Hello, Assembly
As well as a attempting a simple RPG in BASIC, I’m also getting my feet wet with Assembly. I have two main goals with Assembly, ones that cannot be reasonably achieved with BASIC:
- Sound creation and manipulation
- Tile-based graphic scrolling ala the early Ultima games. Even as I’m coming to general grips with Apple II graphics, I have no idea how this was done, so I’m curious to explore it.
An ultimate goal with tile-based scrolling would be do make some sort of super-simplified Starflight clone (I was always jealous that Starflight didn’t exist for the Apple II) — but that is REALLY pie-in-the-sky – I’d be happy just make a successfully little one-area demo. 
I’ve just started “Assembly Language for the Applesoft Programmer” by Finley and Myers, and it seems pretty well written. Despite the title, it’s not about just getting some binary programs to run from your BASIC programs, it’s more a full-on assembly tutorial aimed at weaning a programmer away from BASIC and into pure assembly. Assembly’s making sense so far, a lot of which is probably due to my working through the wonderful book Bebop Bytes Back 6 years ago or so.
I’m using the Merlin assembler, which seems to have a very friendly environment, and I’m delighted it allows the entry of decimal numbers, which I’ll be using to “cheat” as much as possible (sorry, purists).
One alarming thing: there was a typo in one of the early sample programs in the “Assembly Language for the Applesoft Programmer” – a typo that was in fact repeated twice. The program was simple enough that I was able to spot it immediately, but it makes me worried about the longer, more complicated program listings – I might not spot the typos so easily there, which could lead to lots of frustration. If that becomes a problem, I may have to switch to some other book, which would be a shame, because I like the clear writing in this one.
