Amstrad CPC 464 Machine Language For The Absolute Beginner by Melbourne House

[crayzyian]

All,


I would appreciate the thoughts of anyone with experience of this book.  I am interested in developing some machine code capability, having only ever messed about in basic.


http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Amstrad_Machine_Language_for_the_Absolute_Beginner


When you make your comments treat me as the beginner this book is aimed at - thanks in advance!

[tjohnson]

I've not looked at this book but would suggest looking up the tutorial videos from @keith56

https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/multiplatform-z80-asm-development-videos-with-vampires!/msg154129/#msg154129
ChibiAkumas on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8t99gp5IN-FTf5rGVaRevw

[revaldinho]

I like the classic Zaks book for teaching Z80 coding, and as a reference. It's available as a complete PDF at archive.org




https://archive.org/download/Programming_the_Z-80_2nd_Edition_1980_Rodnay_Zaks/Programming_the_Z-80_2nd_Edition_1980_Rodnay_Zaks.pdf



If you want a paper copy, I think I have a very old one which is complete but the binding is poor and has a couple of pages falling out. If you're interested then PM me and I'll check. Yours if I can find it.


This one is also full of good example code, although mainly mathematic and string handling:


https://archive.org/download/bitsavers_osborneboogeSubroutines1983_24203802/Z80_Assembly_Language_Subroutines_1983.pdf



These are generic Z80 books of course. The thing all the various ' ... for the Amstrad' type books give you is the information about how to make use of the CPC specific functions, starting with just being able to read keys and print characters to the screen. I'm sure the Melbourne House book would give you those things, but looks like the relevant pages haven't been scanned in your link reference.  The CPC firmware guide is online at http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/tech/cpc/cpc-firmware/firmware.pdf and can fill in the gaps.

[ervin]

That Melbourne House book is quite good, and indeed helped me a lot in my early days of learning z80.
However, there was a series of articles way back in Computing With The Amstrad that was much easier to follow.

Please let me know if you have trouble accessing the archive.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wts36f4kbnvdsij/cwta.zip?dl=0

[Axelay]

I had this book back in the day, and didn't really like it for two reasons, though one of those might be exactly because it's what you may be after.


The simplest thing I didn't like about it is that the text is printed in a dot matrix printer style font, which I just found made it harder work to read through.


The other thing, which was the main reason, was that I got it discounted as my third book on machine code, hoping it might have something to tell me that I hadn't read in my first two books, but it actually really is meant for absolute beginners.  It has a lot more time spent on concepts than coding for quite a good chunk of the early part of the book compared to the previous books I had read.  So maybe it would be good for someone with no assembly experience at all, but even if it had been my first book, I personally would prefer a book with more extensive practical examples than this book has.

[crayzyian]

Thanks all.  Amazing replies.  I'll go through all this and then work out how best to proceed.