Bluer White

There are just so many fabulous things to see and do at KansasFest that Hackfest has not gotten much attention!  Where else do you get to see the worst Apple product and a disk operating system almost twice as fast as ProDOS?

I want to include full-screen bitmapped images in my entry, and I’m figuring out how to load and display images.  The toolbox does not offer a convenient “load image from file” call so I must provide code to load, parse, and decompress the image file.  I found a CSA2 post with sample code and the Pegasoft Draw Tools package.  Draw Tools provides numerous handy drawing tools, including fades, wipes, animation, and image loading.  So, I’ve installed Draw Tools and have the sample code working.  The TML Pascal samples work well with Complete Pascal since Complete Pascal is really version 2 of TML Pascal.  Work continues …

The annual KansasFest HackFest is on!  I’ve heard rumors of Wizardy cracking and a Rockhurst text adventure.  I’m learning Complete Pascal, learning IIGS toolbox programming, and, just in case I run out of things to do, using those skills to write a graphical Apple II/KFest trivia adventure.  I have Complete Pascal running and am ready to crank out a bit of code.  Stay tuned for more …

Following the model of Eric Shepherd’s “Some Assembly Required: Hello World” article on A2Central and my last post on the Mindcraft Assembler, I’d like to present the traditional “Hello World” program for 8-bit Apple II using Macrosoft.

Macrosoft allows the programmer to achieve machine language speed with a familiar BASIC-like syntax.  Technically, Macrosoft is a macro library for the Mindcraft Assembler.

First, follow the directions included with Macrosoft to create a working disk with The Assembler and Macrosoft.  Next, just like last week’s tutorial, slide the disk into your drive and run the BOOT.SYSTEM program.  Press “E” to enter the editor.  Press “enter” once to get a “!” insert mode prompt.  Type in the following program.  Case does matter, so watch the capitalization.  Also, make sure to begin each line with a space; otherwise, the assembler will interpret your entry as a label.  Notice that, except for a few extra “boilerplate” lines, the program appears similar to BASIC.

USE MACROSOFT.3.1
UEN
MUL
BEGIN $2000
PRINT "Hello world."
CLEANUP
END


Press the “Escape” key and enter “Hello” for the “Save Pathname.”  Press “A” to assemble to program.  If you get errors, return to the editor and correct them.

Finally, press “!” to exit back to BASIC.  Change to the directory containing the HELLO program and type “BRUN HELLO”.