Well I still want my 60p return bus fare to the games shop in Hamersmith back when I had to take back a rather unfinished release of Forbidden Planet ! AND the 17p phone call charge that I made to a telephone number I was told to contact when the game crashed! ;)
Heh good to have you here Simon. One of my favorite software houses at the time that I made a point of collecting originals of. Even the Crystal stuff :) Never DID get another copy of FP for some reason though :(
Well I still want my 60p return bus fare to the games shop in Hamersmith back when I had to take back a rather unfinished release of Forbidden Planet ! AND the 17p phone call charge that I made to a telephone number I was told to contact when the game crashed! ;)
Gah, bloody customers - they're never happy; those that were lucky enough to trip over that bug and make the phone call were the lucky ones - pity the poor sods who actually had to play the game ;-)
Never DID get another copy of FP for some reason though :(
I don't blame you. It was a deeply uninspired game, I'd run out of ideas and so had everyone else involved... In fact, I think I may have played it more tonight (been going through old tapes) than I did while testing it.
Technically it wasn't a bad piece of software, nothing else was doing anything like the dynamic viewpoint clipping that FP had (opaque force fields with holes in 'em you could see through). The trouble was, there was no game play at all, unless we count the hidden game Whino Hunt...
The story of FP is buried in Spectacle2, reading it you can sense the way the whole company was falling apart. It was no coincidence that the FP highscore tables ended with the line "Is this the last, the final game? Get to christmas and feel no regret"... ;)
I was quite impressed with the HOTT weird loader when I first saw it...
HOTT was the first game to have an interesting loader. It was amusing how many people wanted to know how we'd done that... It also buggered up some of the tape copiers, though that wasn't the intention.
De gustibus, and all that. Personally I think Halls was our finest hour, not only did it take the piss technically out of every game that had gone before but I think it had the best game play of anything we did.
A few weeks before it was launched we wandered into one of the common rooms in a hall of residence in Manchester (owen's park) and put an early version of HOTT on the TV. The couple of people there initially grumped, they'd rather have watched TV... Then they started playing, and a few hours later the room was packed with people fighting over the Spectrum. It went on until the early hours... There'd be half a dozen people playing, one steering, one reaching over to do the arrows, one doing the fireballs, and so on, and about thirty others shouting at them - whenever a thing appeared there'd be cries of "Go on! Eff it! Eff it!" (you didn't think fireballs were on the 'F' key because of the initial letter did you?)...
I can remember that in the middle of this I turned to Neil and Martin and said "I think we have a hit on our hands... You realise we'll never do anything better than this, don't you?"
It was a strange thing to have reached the pinnacle of your career at twenty, and to have the sense to know that at the time...
I think ROTT was a disappointment. We had so many ideas for extending HOTT but in the end Neil got stuck with doing most of ROTT while I was writing Dark Star, and Martin wasn't involved... The reason HOTT was so well balanced is that it was the work of all three of us, pretty well equally - HOTT was written over about a month or so with the three of us sat there working on it simultaneously. One would be typing while the others looked over their shoulder and checked, or thought about the next routine, or waited to pounce on the keyboard. (Fifteen years later this technique would be rediscovered and called eXtreme Programming, but I digress...) with ROTT this just didn't happen, and it shows; the code is typical Neil assembler, perfectly coded, but the game-play just isn't as fine tuned.
There were things in ROTT I liked. I liked the mutable 'walls' but we should have made more of that idea. The idea of having 'genetic' coding so the things could breed and adapt, which was intended for HOTT, didn't make it again. Pity because it was nicely worked out... Neither did many improved weapons, timed bombs, contact sensitive bombs, hand grenades and such like. A real shame.
A big hearty Welcome! (again)Do you recall who did the loading screen for IOTBS? (always loved the mountains)
'fraid knot. The loading screen I did was just a screenshot from the game, and that's what the Crystal release had. The pretty loading screen was something added later for a cover release and was nothing to do with me. In fact, it was more or less a pirate because neither Neil nor I received any royalties from it. Or from any of the other re-releases of the Crystal/Design Design games, for that matter.
Blimey. I hardly need add that I'm also chuffed to see DD's supremo here on the board.
Whatever became of Basil and The Beast?
I also was a big fan of Crystal's games - I thought Rommel's Revenge was way ahead of its time for a Spectrum game and still play Dark Star to this day. I couldn't get into FP though, which was a shame - I thought it was technically light years ahed of anything else out there.
There was a messy divorce, Basil ran off with a younger FPGA and had to pay PALimony.
Basil still runs, not bad for a 23-year old design. I'll upload some details of my development machines to the desdes web site.
I carried on using Basil for serious work until the early 90's, then I moved the Zeus assembler across to the PC and made that my development system of choice. But I miss some of the features Basil provided...
I still use the DOS PC development tools I wrote then, or rather a direct descendent of them, when working in assembler. I'm only just making the transition from using my DOS based tools to 'pure' Win32 based ones - a change brought on more by Microsloth's inability to write good DOS emulation than anything else, the windows tools are prettier but not much more functional.
I thought Rommel's Revenge was way ahead of its time for a Spectrum game
Yes, Martin did very well with that; all his own work, though for some reason WoS has it credited to Dave De-Leuw as well. (Dave was the graphic designer for the case artwork).
I used to take the piss out of him for it being far too slow, eventually I had to write a version to show what could be done, hence Tank Busters for the Amstrad. Never did get round to porting TB onto the Spectrum, which may well be my subconscious conceeding the point that Martin wasn't so far off the mark performance-wise ;)
Martin gave me the source files for Rommel - he wrote it using Zeus on a spectrum, using cassette tape and all, something that still amazes me; I wouldn't ever have had the patience. If I can persuade the tapes to load I'll publish them as well, I'm sure he wouldn't mind now.
I couldn't get into FP though, which was a shame - I thought it was technically light years ahed of anything else out there.
Technically, yes. Miserable game, though...
[muses] Given that Spectrum code is now run on emulators and can be run at effective speeds of ~100Mhz (Z80 clocks) it might be nice to make a small change to the Rommel, Dark Star and Forbidden Planet games code so that they can all be frame-locked... They'd look /far/ prettier then.
I'm Simon Brattel, or so I've been led to believe at any rate... Founder of Design Design, for my sins.
Probably sick and tired of it but what the heck !
Halls of the things ! What a game ! One of the first games i bought on the Speccy, hard as anything, made me jump tons back then (hey i was young) and i wish i was an octopus with that keyboard layout ;)
What a game though. Was so looking forward to Return of the things, was much the same of course but couldnt wait to get that after saving up my pocket money !
Yes, Martin did very well with that; all his own work, though for some reason WoS has it credited to Dave De-Leuw as well. (Dave was the graphic designer for the case artwork).
Thanks. Another minor point I noticed while rummaging in the archives was that they have "Galactic Patrol" down as a Design Design MIA game (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0020179) - it shouldn't be regarded as missing, it never actually existed. I think the reference should be removed.
The problem was that adverts had long lead times, so when we placed the advert copy we had to guess in advance what games would be available when the adverts were printed several months later... Galactic Patrol was just a convenient non-descript name to hang a game onto, except that we never got round to using it ;)
Amendment - Martin Horsley did start writing something that we had as a candidate for release as Galactic Patrol, a very unfinished demo can be found here http://www.desdes.com/products/oldfiles/martin.szx I suppose it might make sense to have that linked there? Anyone familiar with the BBC game "Starship Command" might notice a certain modicum of resemblence... I think we killed the project because we couldn't think of any way to improve on SC and weren't particularly interested in selling a direct copy.
Thanks. Another minor point I noticed while rummaging in the archives was that they have "Galactic Patrol" down as a Design Design MIA game (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0020179) - it shouldn't be regarded as missing, it never actually existed. I think the reference should be removed.
No, no, no! Do not remove it!
Instead of MIA I believe WoS also has the label "Game That Time Forgot" (or something similar to it) i.e. a game which was planned/started but never fully realised (for whatever reason).
'fraid knot. The loading screen I did was just a screenshot from the game, and that's what the Crystal release had. The pretty loading screen was something added later for a cover release and was nothing to do with me. In fact, it was more or less a pirate because neither Neil nor I received any royalties from it. Or from any of the other re-releases of the Crystal/Design Design games, for that matter.
Ah, probably not a good time to mention that I used to work for Firebird then?
After much farting about I've pieced together the original source code for the spectrum version of Forbidden Planet. I don't know why either.
After even more farting about - songs should be written, etc, etc - I've ported it onto the abortion of an assembler in zx-spin... So all you lot have to do is download it, load it into zx-spin's assembler, assemble it and you can be as bored as I was writing it.
Thrill to the, um, ah... awesomeness of it all.
Seriously, if you want a challenge take the bloody thing and make it interesting. It's a nice piece of code in many respects, it just isn't a nice game...
I'm sorry if you think it's personal, but it's my belief that shitty code should be treated with contempt. I do it with my own, why should anyone else's code be exempted? If you don't want negative reactions then don't settle for distributing poor code...
Rather than waste time arguing about it I'd be prepared to have a look at the source and fix some of the problems. Provided it isn't spaghettii, of course.
I just looked at the "demo sheet" and was impressed at the speed. (BTW I had to assemble/run/restart/repeat three times before it actually worked in Spin, first I got a black screen with red stripes, next I got a low buzzzzzzz and white screen, then at last it worked)
Thanks for including the source, that's a treasure trove of information for those of us who are just now figuring out this whole coding thing :grin:
PS Under Display, option 3 the first part is scrambled ... all I get is "SCRAMBLEdeangle" (Wideangle?)
PPS Ooooh, that SCRAMBLE sign is actually the SD (sign(dislocations)).
PPPS And line F in the highscore is partially garbage-scrambled.
PPPPS Gone to bed ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzz zzzz zzz zz z ...
I just looked at the "demo sheet" and was impressed at the speed.
I optimised it pretty well, technically it was a nice piece of coding, but I was so fed up with 3D graphics by then that I never got round to working out what the game should be...
(BTW I had to assemble/run/restart/repeat three times before it actually worked in Spin, first I got a black screen with red stripes, next I got a low buzzzzzzz and white screen, then at last it worked)
I suspect that's because you didn't pause the spectrum while assembling. I found that the most reliable way was to pause the spectrum, assemble the file, use the program/run menu option then un-pause the spectrum. Doing that always seems to work for me...
Thanks for including the source, that's a treasure trove of information for those of us who are just now figuring out this whole coding thing :grin:
No problem. Of course, we never looked at anyone else's code, we had to make it up as we went along. Alone. Unaided. [and if you'll believe that I have some bank shares I'd like to discuss]
PS Under Display, option 3 the first part is scrambled ... all I get is "SCRAMBLEdeangle" (Wideangle?)
PPS Ooooh, that SCRAMBLE sign is actually the SD (sign(dislocations)).
PPPS And line F in the highscore is partially garbage-scrambled.
Again, I suspect this is because the spectrum was running during the assembly process. Try pausing it (button on lower-left of main screen)... I have no such problems here - I think the source is grossly correct.
I'm sorry if you think it's personal, but it's my belief that shitty code should be treated with contempt. I do it with my own, why should anyone else's code be exempted? If you don't want negative reactions then don't settle for distributing poor code...
Rather than waste time arguing about it I'd be prepared to have a look at the source and fix some of the problems. Provided it isn't spaghettii, of course.
Yeah, slag it off by all means, don't offer constructive criticism whatever you do. Don't, for God's sake, say what you'd like improved. That'd be too reasonable, wouldn't it?
If you dislike SPIN's assembler *that* much then why the hell did you use it? Nobody's forcing you to! In fact we'd rather you didn't in future. Might I recommend Pasmo? It's very popular and stacked full of features.
Still... at the end of the day, we're not getting paid to write SPIN and as we've said before, we add things mainly for our own use. If people like it then that's all well and good. If people don't, then that's just tough titties.
Edit: There are of course improvements on the way for the assembler and debugger in the next release but as to whether anyone wants to stick around to actually see them or not, I couldn't give a monkeys. Oh, and no thanks, you won't be looking at the source.
Still... at the end of the day, we're not getting paid to write SPIN and as we've said before, we add things mainly for our own use. If people like it then that's all well and good. If people don't, then that's just tough titties
Far out... so PASMO is a commercial development then?
I suspect that's because you didn't pause the spectrum while assembling. I found that the most reliable way was to pause the spectrum, assemble the file, use the program/run menu option then un-pause the spectrum. Doing that always seems to work for me...
Hmmm, nope, I actually followed your instructions and paused inbetween.
The only difference I see (now afterwards) is that this computer has ZXSPIN0.622 ... I'll plop .666 on it instead.
Ok, it's all a bit of fun thowing a bit of mud and insults about but what is actually wrong with the Spin assembler?
It's alright saying it's an abomination and offering to fix the code but no-one is actually saying what the assembler is doing wrong or not doing at all.
As Marko says any criticism should be constructive and should be backed with detail/examples and bug reports.
Anything other than that and the criticism is not justified or warranted.
Surely the whole idea is to encourage and help the guys (and I include myself) who write these tools and not just shoot them down with no visible reason.
Without Spin / Spectaculator / SpecEmu there would be virtually no Spectrum emulation and definitely no ongoing emulation projects.
Okay, since I've been mucking about with the Spin assembler trying to assemble SpaceInvaders (from the Design Design site), here are a few odd things I came across:
1) No undo option.
2) Pressing TAB on selected text deletes the text! This combined with point 1 above makes for much teeth-gnashing. :)
3) If I uncheck the "Messages" option in the menu and try to check it again, the assembler crashes. I get a "Win32 API function failed" error in the end as well.
4) Use of non-standard icons for cut,copy and paste. Bug icon for "copy" isn't intuitive. Plus, the icon for highlight line doubles as the icon for cut which makes it confusing.
5) Can we have the # as the prefix for hex as I believe this is standard way to represent hex in some assemblers (the ones I've used anyway ;) )? An option perhaps between $ and #?
6) I'm probably being thick here but what does "Revert" in the menu do?
7) The Editor settings are blanked out in the options menu. As a result I can't set the Tab size to the one I want. Can we have this enabled please?
As you can see the list is mostly related to user-interface rather than the assembler itself. I actually like the assembler - it's simple, easy to use and gets the job done, which is what a casual programmer (okay noobie if you insist) like me wants.
Having said that, it would be great if the assembler GUI was on par with the rest of Spin's interface - at the moment it looks like a separate entity that's been tacked onto Spin as an afterthought.
Selecting a block of text and pressing tab deletes the text and replaces with a tab? I'm sure that is the supposed to be the behaviour that windows has always used, although i think MS Office now tabs the text. Not sure for definite tho.
As for the Spin Assembler, for small projects it is great, but when I write anything that requires multiple asm/bin files I always use Pasmo. Once Pasmo is setup to compile and run the binary in Spin (using the F keys), it is great...
Comments
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1380&highlight=forbidden+planet
Heh good to have you here Simon. One of my favorite software houses at the time that I made a point of collecting originals of. Even the Crystal stuff :) Never DID get another copy of FP for some reason though :(
Gah, bloody customers - they're never happy; those that were lucky enough to trip over that bug and make the phone call were the lucky ones - pity the poor sods who actually had to play the game ;-)
I don't blame you. It was a deeply uninspired game, I'd run out of ideas and so had everyone else involved... In fact, I think I may have played it more tonight (been going through old tapes) than I did while testing it.
Technically it wasn't a bad piece of software, nothing else was doing anything like the dynamic viewpoint clipping that FP had (opaque force fields with holes in 'em you could see through). The trouble was, there was no game play at all, unless we count the hidden game Whino Hunt...
The story of FP is buried in Spectacle2, reading it you can sense the way the whole company was falling apart. It was no coincidence that the FP highscore tables ended with the line "Is this the last, the final game? Get to christmas and feel no regret"... ;)
HOTT was the first game to have an interesting loader. It was amusing how many people wanted to know how we'd done that... It also buggered up some of the tape copiers, though that wasn't the intention.
De gustibus, and all that. Personally I think Halls was our finest hour, not only did it take the piss technically out of every game that had gone before but I think it had the best game play of anything we did.
A few weeks before it was launched we wandered into one of the common rooms in a hall of residence in Manchester (owen's park) and put an early version of HOTT on the TV. The couple of people there initially grumped, they'd rather have watched TV... Then they started playing, and a few hours later the room was packed with people fighting over the Spectrum. It went on until the early hours... There'd be half a dozen people playing, one steering, one reaching over to do the arrows, one doing the fireballs, and so on, and about thirty others shouting at them - whenever a thing appeared there'd be cries of "Go on! Eff it! Eff it!" (you didn't think fireballs were on the 'F' key because of the initial letter did you?)...
I can remember that in the middle of this I turned to Neil and Martin and said "I think we have a hit on our hands... You realise we'll never do anything better than this, don't you?"
It was a strange thing to have reached the pinnacle of your career at twenty, and to have the sense to know that at the time...
I think ROTT was a disappointment. We had so many ideas for extending HOTT but in the end Neil got stuck with doing most of ROTT while I was writing Dark Star, and Martin wasn't involved... The reason HOTT was so well balanced is that it was the work of all three of us, pretty well equally - HOTT was written over about a month or so with the three of us sat there working on it simultaneously. One would be typing while the others looked over their shoulder and checked, or thought about the next routine, or waited to pounce on the keyboard. (Fifteen years later this technique would be rediscovered and called eXtreme Programming, but I digress...) with ROTT this just didn't happen, and it shows; the code is typical Neil assembler, perfectly coded, but the game-play just isn't as fine tuned.
There were things in ROTT I liked. I liked the mutable 'walls' but we should have made more of that idea. The idea of having 'genetic' coding so the things could breed and adapt, which was intended for HOTT, didn't make it again. Pity because it was nicely worked out... Neither did many improved weapons, timed bombs, contact sensitive bombs, hand grenades and such like. A real shame.
'fraid knot. The loading screen I did was just a screenshot from the game, and that's what the Crystal release had. The pretty loading screen was something added later for a cover release and was nothing to do with me. In fact, it was more or less a pirate because neither Neil nor I received any royalties from it. Or from any of the other re-releases of the Crystal/Design Design games, for that matter.
Quite possibly, but I smell nicer. [rummage] Oh, dammit - he was cremated. Um. In that case no, he's lost a lot of weight...
Are you the same Chris Pile who wrote Dr Kode? That was a great little assembler and I used it lots, thanks.
Always an exciting time in WOS when an 80's Speccy icon turns up in our humble forums...
Whatever became of Basil and The Beast?
I also was a big fan of Crystal's games - I thought Rommel's Revenge was way ahead of its time for a Spectrum game and still play Dark Star to this day. I couldn't get into FP though, which was a shame - I thought it was technically light years ahed of anything else out there.
There was a messy divorce, Basil ran off with a younger FPGA and had to pay PALimony.
Basil still runs, not bad for a 23-year old design. I'll upload some details of my development machines to the desdes web site.
I carried on using Basil for serious work until the early 90's, then I moved the Zeus assembler across to the PC and made that my development system of choice. But I miss some of the features Basil provided...
I still use the DOS PC development tools I wrote then, or rather a direct descendent of them, when working in assembler. I'm only just making the transition from using my DOS based tools to 'pure' Win32 based ones - a change brought on more by Microsloth's inability to write good DOS emulation than anything else, the windows tools are prettier but not much more functional.
Yes, Martin did very well with that; all his own work, though for some reason WoS has it credited to Dave De-Leuw as well. (Dave was the graphic designer for the case artwork).
I used to take the piss out of him for it being far too slow, eventually I had to write a version to show what could be done, hence Tank Busters for the Amstrad. Never did get round to porting TB onto the Spectrum, which may well be my subconscious conceeding the point that Martin wasn't so far off the mark performance-wise ;)
Martin gave me the source files for Rommel - he wrote it using Zeus on a spectrum, using cassette tape and all, something that still amazes me; I wouldn't ever have had the patience. If I can persuade the tapes to load I'll publish them as well, I'm sure he wouldn't mind now.
DS was OK, though it was more of a graphics demo than a game.
Technically, yes. Miserable game, though...
[muses] Given that Spectrum code is now run on emulators and can be run at effective speeds of ~100Mhz (Z80 clocks) it might be nice to make a small change to the Rommel, Dark Star and Forbidden Planet games code so that they can all be frame-locked... They'd look /far/ prettier then.
I might even get round to it at some point.
Probably sick and tired of it but what the heck !
Halls of the things ! What a game ! One of the first games i bought on the Speccy, hard as anything, made me jump tons back then (hey i was young) and i wish i was an octopus with that keyboard layout ;)
What a game though. Was so looking forward to Return of the things, was much the same of course but couldnt wait to get that after saving up my pocket money !
Welcome to the forum !
This error has been fixed now.
Thanks. Another minor point I noticed while rummaging in the archives was that they have "Galactic Patrol" down as a Design Design MIA game (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0020179) - it shouldn't be regarded as missing, it never actually existed. I think the reference should be removed.
The problem was that adverts had long lead times, so when we placed the advert copy we had to guess in advance what games would be available when the adverts were printed several months later... Galactic Patrol was just a convenient non-descript name to hang a game onto, except that we never got round to using it ;)
Amendment - Martin Horsley did start writing something that we had as a candidate for release as Galactic Patrol, a very unfinished demo can be found here http://www.desdes.com/products/oldfiles/martin.szx I suppose it might make sense to have that linked there? Anyone familiar with the BBC game "Starship Command" might notice a certain modicum of resemblence... I think we killed the project because we couldn't think of any way to improve on SC and weren't particularly interested in selling a direct copy.
No, no, no! Do not remove it!
Instead of MIA I believe WoS also has the label "Game That Time Forgot" (or something similar to it) i.e. a game which was planned/started but never fully realised (for whatever reason).
And it prompts the question - was the ship from Dark Star named after The Lying Bastard from Ringworld?
Ah, probably not a good time to mention that I used to work for Firebird then?
FWIW many years ago I asked Graham Stafford the same question, and he told me that it was!
http://birdsanctuary.co.uk/darkstar/i.php
After even more farting about - songs should be written, etc, etc - I've ported it onto the abortion of an assembler in zx-spin... So all you lot have to do is download it, load it into zx-spin's assembler, assemble it and you can be as bored as I was writing it.
Thrill to the, um, ah... awesomeness of it all.
Seriously, if you want a challenge take the bloody thing and make it interesting. It's a nice piece of code in many respects, it just isn't a nice game...
All the source code in a single file:
http://www.desdes.com/products/oldfiles/fp_spin.asm
Yeah, we love you too...
I'm sorry if you think it's personal, but it's my belief that shitty code should be treated with contempt. I do it with my own, why should anyone else's code be exempted? If you don't want negative reactions then don't settle for distributing poor code...
Rather than waste time arguing about it I'd be prepared to have a look at the source and fix some of the problems. Provided it isn't spaghettii, of course.
Thanks for including the source, that's a treasure trove of information for those of us who are just now figuring out this whole coding thing :grin:
PS Under Display, option 3 the first part is scrambled ... all I get is "SCRAMBLEdeangle" (Wideangle?)
PPS Ooooh, that SCRAMBLE sign is actually the SD (sign(dislocations)).
PPPS And line F in the highscore is partially garbage-scrambled.
PPPPS Gone to bed ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzz zzzz zzz zz z ...
I optimised it pretty well, technically it was a nice piece of coding, but I was so fed up with 3D graphics by then that I never got round to working out what the game should be...
I suspect that's because you didn't pause the spectrum while assembling. I found that the most reliable way was to pause the spectrum, assemble the file, use the program/run menu option then un-pause the spectrum. Doing that always seems to work for me...
No problem. Of course, we never looked at anyone else's code, we had to make it up as we went along. Alone. Unaided. [and if you'll believe that I have some bank shares I'd like to discuss]
Again, I suspect this is because the spectrum was running during the assembly process. Try pausing it (button on lower-left of main screen)... I have no such problems here - I think the source is grossly correct.
Bloody good idea. I shall head bedwise myself... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz zzzzz <- 80 of 'em
Yeah, slag it off by all means, don't offer constructive criticism whatever you do. Don't, for God's sake, say what you'd like improved. That'd be too reasonable, wouldn't it?
If you dislike SPIN's assembler *that* much then why the hell did you use it? Nobody's forcing you to! In fact we'd rather you didn't in future. Might I recommend Pasmo? It's very popular and stacked full of features.
Still... at the end of the day, we're not getting paid to write SPIN and as we've said before, we add things mainly for our own use. If people like it then that's all well and good. If people don't, then that's just tough titties.
Edit: There are of course improvements on the way for the assembler and debugger in the next release but as to whether anyone wants to stick around to actually see them or not, I couldn't give a monkeys. Oh, and no thanks, you won't be looking at the source.
Far out... so PASMO is a commercial development then?
No, Pasmo is free as well. Your point is?
You should put your handbag away.
Hmmm, nope, I actually followed your instructions and paused inbetween.
The only difference I see (now afterwards) is that this computer has ZXSPIN0.622 ... I'll plop .666 on it instead.
It's alright saying it's an abomination and offering to fix the code but no-one is actually saying what the assembler is doing wrong or not doing at all.
As Marko says any criticism should be constructive and should be backed with detail/examples and bug reports.
Anything other than that and the criticism is not justified or warranted.
Surely the whole idea is to encourage and help the guys (and I include myself) who write these tools and not just shoot them down with no visible reason.
Without Spin / Spectaculator / SpecEmu there would be virtually no Spectrum emulation and definitely no ongoing emulation projects.
1) No undo option.
2) Pressing TAB on selected text deletes the text! This combined with point 1 above makes for much teeth-gnashing. :)
3) If I uncheck the "Messages" option in the menu and try to check it again, the assembler crashes. I get a "Win32 API function failed" error in the end as well.
4) Use of non-standard icons for cut,copy and paste. Bug icon for "copy" isn't intuitive. Plus, the icon for highlight line doubles as the icon for cut which makes it confusing.
5) Can we have the # as the prefix for hex as I believe this is standard way to represent hex in some assemblers (the ones I've used anyway ;) )? An option perhaps between $ and #?
6) I'm probably being thick here but what does "Revert" in the menu do?
7) The Editor settings are blanked out in the options menu. As a result I can't set the Tab size to the one I want. Can we have this enabled please?
As you can see the list is mostly related to user-interface rather than the assembler itself. I actually like the assembler - it's simple, easy to use and gets the job done, which is what a casual programmer (okay noobie if you insist) like me wants.
Having said that, it would be great if the assembler GUI was on par with the rest of Spin's interface - at the moment it looks like a separate entity that's been tacked onto Spin as an afterthought.
*Gets helmet*
:grin:
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.
As for the Spin Assembler, for small projects it is great, but when I write anything that requires multiple asm/bin files I always use Pasmo. Once Pasmo is setup to compile and run the binary in Spin (using the F keys), it is great...
:)
I can't say I've used the Spin assembler much, but the debugger is worth its weight in mint boxed ZX80s.