> I agree that a PC Basic, based on SAM Basic, which is of >coursed based on Spectrum Basic, would be a nice idea - the big >question is /who could write it?/ Personally, just getting a few people >together to help sort out SAM's ROM and DOS is a hard enough >task -it seems that there are still too many people whose main >interest is coding stupid scrolly demos which serve no purpose other >than to inflate there [sic] own egos for five minutes. I've said it >before, and no doubt I'll say it again, if just 10% of the talent in the >SAM world was capable of being properly managed on >professionally formulated projects, then the SAM world would have >software and hardware coming out of its ears.
The problem with this, of course, is that a lot of these programmers *are* being properly managed on professionally formulated projects. It's just that when they've finished working on them, they're too knackered to do anything SAM-wise. All of the people who wrote the stupid scrolly demos when they were 15 are now at University, in full time work, self employed, have families, or any of a whole menagerie of different situation and time-sucking activities. It doesn't leave much time for lil' ol' SAM. BTW: I have now learned how to program Windows software, so the Assembler should be back on track. For the past week I've been working on a motor and laser controller system for steel-sheet width and shape tolerance control, with real-time (well, 50 frames/second - I wonder where that came from) display of the cross section of the sheet and a plan view as it goes through the sensor system. (For steel mills, no less). Today I wrote my own scripting language for that system, which I'm quite happy about. It's pared down to a minimum so that it doesn't require much processing, so we're talking 1 and 2 letter commands. It works quite well, and is multithreaded - as is all of the comms stuff. So now I'm quite happy that I should be able to get somewhere with the assembler editor at the very least. The actual assembler itself is annoying me, as I keep trying to do all the flashy stuff rather than starting at the beginning and continuing to the end. (Which means I've got plenty of design done, and not much actual code to show for it). If anyone has any good pointers on linking assemblers, especially for paged memory architectures, or if you can point me in the direction of a good book on the subject, can you let me know? Thanks, Simon ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
