New Book - Programming Games for the Colecovision and Adam in Assembler

[Tony Cruise]

Thanks to Cote Gamers, the physical edition of the book is ready for pre-order from their website here:

https://cotegamers.com/shop/en/accueil/61-programming-games-for-the-colecovision-and-adam.html

 

$30 Euro plus $US10 tracked postage to most places around the world.

[Ikrananka]

21 minutes ago, Tony Cruise said:

Thanks to Cote Gamers, the physical edition of the book is ready for pre-order from their website here:

https://cotegamers.com/shop/en/accueil/61-programming-games-for-the-colecovision-and-adam.html

 

$30 Euro plus $US10 tracked postage to most places around the world.

Ordered 😀

 

BTW - shipping is 10 Euro and not US$10.

[xdurable]

Ordered - Thanks Tony for putting it together.

[youki]

ordered too    looking foward to have it!...   may be i will manage finally to do a good game! 

 

[tanuki]

In these case youki, you should read the Holy Bible ! it's all about miracles 😝

[NIAD]

3 hours ago, youki said:

ordered too    looking foward to have it!...   may be i will manage finally to do a good game! 

 

At least make a game where the IP holder won’t bring down the hammer on you... the little blue guys and a galaxy far far away!

[youki]

12 hours ago, NIAD said:

At least make a game where the IP holder won’t bring down the hammer on you... the little blue guys and a galaxy far far away!

My next game will be  "The Jedi Smurf strike back!" 😀

 

[youki]

13 hours ago, tanuki said:

In these case youki, you should read the Holy Bible ! it's all about miracles 😝

you 're a <censored> ! 🤬🤬🤬

 

😄

[zaphro72]

6 hours ago, youki said:

My next game will be  "The Jedi Smurf strike back!" 😀

 

I am all in to buy this 😜 

Edited September 15, 2020 by zaphro72

[Ikrananka]

As well as pre-ordering the physical book I also just bought the Kindle version as I had some time on my hands to read it while away from home.  Really enjoying it so far but have spotted a few minor errors that I thought I'd let you know about:

• The ColecoVision VDP is listed in many places as being the TMS9918A whereas in practice it was the TMS9928A (NTSC) and TMS9929A (PAL) that was used.  I know that from a programming perspective they are the same but it's still an important distinction.
• Page 16 - CV Specifications table - the Z80A clock speed is near as damn it 3.58Hz and not the 3.57Hz listed (splitting hairs I guess but isn't timing everything 😛).
• Page 17 - ADAM Specifications table - same as above.
• Page 19 - "Sprite and Tile patterns can of be made..." I suspect should be "Sprite and Tile patterns can be made..."
• Page 32 - 8-bit Registers table.  IYL description I believe should read "The lower byte of the IY register." and not "The lower byte of the IX register."

This is about as far as I've got.  If this is useful to you then I can highlight others if I come across any.

[Tony Cruise]

1 hour ago, Ikrananka said:

As well as pre-ordering the physical book I also just bought the Kindle version as I had some time on my hands to read it while away from home.  Really enjoying it so far but have spotted a few minor errors that I thought I'd let you know about:

• The ColecoVision VDP is listed in many places as being the TMS9918A whereas in practice it was the TMS9928A (NTSC) and TMS9929A (PAL) that was used.  I know that from a programming perspective they are the same but it's still an important distinction.
• Page 16 - CV Specifications table - the Z80A clock speed is near as damn it 3.58Hz and not the 3.57Hz listed (splitting hairs I guess but isn't timing everything 😛).
• Page 17 - ADAM Specifications table - same as above.
• Page 19 - "Sprite and Tile patterns can of be made..." I suspect should be "Sprite and Tile patterns can be made..."
• Page 32 - 8-bit Registers table.  IYL description I believe should read "The lower byte of the IY register." and not "The lower byte of the IX register."

This is about as far as I've got.  If this is useful to you then I can highlight others if I come across any.

Thank you, this is definitely useful as I can do some final edits before the print edition gets printed at the end of the month.

Good to hear you are enjoying it so far as well  

[tanuki]

Great ! There is still plenty of time to correct it !

[Ikrananka]

Great - I'll let you know if I spot anything else.

[Eric M]

I've just ordered it too.

Can't wait to transform some C code into real ASM hihihihihihi

 

Thanks Tony and Côtégamers

 

Eric

[tanuki]

we are happy to help the community!

[Ikrananka]

Found some time to read more of the book.  This'll definitely need a few more read throughs for this beginner to get to grips with things.  Regardless of the fact I'm a complete assembler noob, I'm still very much enjoying the read.  Found a few more minor issues:

• Page 38: "The best strategy is to use 'jump relative' in most instance, and only change it to 'jump' (or reorganise your code)....." should read "The best strategy is to use 'jump relative' in most instances, and only change it to 'jump direct' (or reorganise your code)....."
• Page 130: The sound chip is listed in several locations as being the "SN76389A" whereas it should be "SN76489AN" (although the "N" could be omitted as it only refers to the chip package)
• Page 130: ".... Sega SG-1000/SC-300" should be ".... Sega SG-1000/SC-3000"
• Page 130: "... and Memotech" might be better as "... and Memotech MTX"
• Page 130: I'm not a music guy so don't know if this is correct but according to this website the range from A2 - 10 cents to A12 - 12 cents is 10 octaves and not the 8 octaves given on page 130.

Hope this helps.

[Ikrananka]

Finally finished my first read through the book,  Great stuff and looking forward to reading it again but this time actually working through the game development on my pc.

 

I did find a few a couple more minor issues:

• Page 222: In a couple of locations on this page it mentions that the logo screen is displayed for 10 seconds.  In fact this is 3.3 seconds for PAL/SECAM systems and 12.7 seconds on NTSC systems.  More info here.
• Page 222: In a couple of locations on this page it mentions that the default message is displayed for 60 seconds before turning off the display.  This is in fact ~75 seconds (for all systems).
• Page 247: There is an inconsistent use of lowercase and uppercase 'k' / 'K' on this page when denoting kilobytes.
• Page 253: There is an inconsistent use of lowercase and uppercase 'k' / 'K' on this page when denoting kilobytes.
• Page 256: Last sentence, "....your first block needs load the rest...." should likely read "....your first block needs to load the rest...."

I also noted an inconsistent use of uppercase and lowercase 'h' / 'H' throughout the book when used to denote hexadecimal numbers.  Also, some numbers were not prefixed by zero, e.g. on page 255 "(C000h to FFFFh)" and on others they are, e.g. page 256 "0C800h".  And in some cases there is no zero prefix or h suffix, e.g. page 190 "73C6".

 

Hope this helps.

[tanuki]

This helps, big thanks

[imstarryeyed]

Ordered the book just now from Cotegamers website, I had to own the print one!  Good luck with the book!

 

 

[Tony Cruise]

Just now, imstarryeyed said:

Ordered the book just now from Cotegamers website, I had to own the print one!  Good luck with the book!

 

 

Thank you, the actual print run is only a few days away, so it won't be long before you have a copy.

[imstarryeyed]

Just an FYI, even though the CoteGamers website allows you to change the currency from Euro to US dollars, if you use PayPal, Paypal will not let you pay in US Dollars.  I had to change the format on the CoteGamers website to Euros before I was able to Paypal the funds.  So anyone in the US who may be having trouble buying it with PayPal might want to check this.

 

 

[Tony Cruise]

19 minutes ago, imstarryeyed said:

Just an FYI, even though the CoteGamers website allows you to change the currency from Euro to US dollars, if you use PayPal, Paypal will not let you pay in US Dollars.  I had to change the format on the CoteGamers website to Euros before I was able to Paypal the funds.  So anyone in the US who may be having trouble buying it with PayPal might want to check this.

 

 

Good Deal Games are going to stock the book in the US as well, but it will be a few weeks before it will be able to be listed due to issues with shipping more than one book at a time at the moment.

[tanuki]

20 hours ago, imstarryeyed said:

Just an FYI, even though the CoteGamers website allows you to change the currency from Euro to US dollars, if you use PayPal, Paypal will not let you pay in US Dollars.  I had to change the format on the CoteGamers website to Euros before I was able to Paypal the funds.  So anyone in the US who may be having trouble buying it with PayPal might want to check this.

 

 

Huuuummmm. Thank you for this information, I was not aware of this !

[Ikrananka]

Tony, I'm now working through your excellent YouTube programming series.  I've only got to Episode 7 but was wondering something about the text editor you use.  In the early episodes, and in the new book, you recommend/suggest using the ConTEXT editor, but then in the video series you switch over to using Sublime Text.  I'm just curious what you current editor of choice is now.

 

I have a simple non-game test project I want to tackle as my first foray into programming the CV, part of which will involve showing white lines on a black background.  I'm assuming that my best approach to this is to set up a bunch of tiles and was planning on using your Sprite & Tile editor.  So, in this case should I draw tiles with the white lines and the other pixels black.  Or should I leave the other pixels transparent and simply set the background plane to black?  Or does it not really matter?

[Tony Cruise]

4 hours ago, Ikrananka said:

Tony, I'm now working through your excellent YouTube programming series.  I've only got to Episode 7 but was wondering something about the text editor you use.  In the early episodes, and in the new book, you recommend/suggest using the ConTEXT editor, but then in the video series you switch over to using Sublime Text.  I'm just curious what you current editor of choice is now.

 

I have a simple non-game test project I want to tackle as my first foray into programming the CV, part of which will involve showing white lines on a black background.  I'm assuming that my best approach to this is to set up a bunch of tiles and was planning on using your Sprite & Tile editor.  So, in this case should I draw tiles with the white lines and the other pixels black.  Or should I leave the other pixels transparent and simply set the background plane to black?  Or does it not really matter?

I do definitely prefer using Sublime Text, as it has a very nice presentation style i.e. fonts, colours etc, plus is much more extensible.  It also works on other platforms.  The only caveat is it is not free, so I bought a license.

Since then Visual Studio Code has been released, which is actually built on a similar platform base to Sublime, and is also multi-platform, so I would probably pick that if I started again as it is of course free.

 

Tiles are definitely the way to go, as to whether you use white lines on either black or transparent background it would depend on whether you want the colour of the squares to change if you change the border colour of the screen at any stage.  So unless that matters then which one you use, won't matter in the end.  Now if you were making it for MSX, there are several MSX machines that allow you to overlay the computer signal with another video feed, which would then show that video in any tiles that used transparent as their background colour.