OmniDo wrote:Hrmm...interesting, as I was always under the impression from my brief experience with assembly that it was considered "God's Language" because if you are coding for x86 architecture, you can literally tell the processor what to do, instruction by instruction.
While this may seem tedious and boring (what coding isnt?) it still is nonetheless the most direct method to controlling a PC.
Well, yes, Assembly is the Divine Language perhaps, but it is also the most difficult to start off with, and as Rahly said, it will take ages for you to create a simple program that pops up a window that says "Hello World". Programming soley in assembly in W32 can be a nasty thing, recommended for fetish addicts only.
Using higher languages gives a much more readable source code, that will take care of many basic, but nevertheless important, instructions for you, that would be utter hell to recreate yourself in assembly. You can't imagine how tedious it is to write routines that just print a line on screen. You have to in assembly. This is what you are looking at with the language. You will have to create each and every function yourself.
The DOS version of MultiEx Commander uses assembly for specific routines, and for some printing as well. But it also featured a "windows"-like approach, such that I could just open new "windows" wherever on screen and whenever I needed and use them to show whatever I needed them to show. That was probably the biggest task in the creation process of the program, not the actual functionality of the program. It goes to illustrate the boring and tedious proces of having to recreate every basic thing before you can get to the good part: the actual functionality.
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Luckily I did most of this in C. Imagine the time lost if I had chosen to do all that in assembly as well.
OmniDo wrote:By the way, any luck with that Myst 4 data file? Im anxious to see what you can turn up by way of developing a method to extract its resource files.
I have figured out the format of the one file, but had to compare to other m4b files. So I downloaded the demos, to look at the big m4b files, they are in a different format however. This may be due to the version being a demo. Is it possible for you to save the first, say, 512 KB of the bigger files you have and zip them so you can attach them here?
Any good hexeditor will let you open a file and select/copy-paste content into a new file, which you can then post here. Try Hex Workshop from Breakpoint Software, if you need to know a good editor.
Rahly wrote:Actually, a lot of people still write in assembly, they just don't write an entire program in assembly. Most of the people who do end up writing assembly, write it inline with their c/c++/delphi code. For the most part, Mr Mouse is right, most compilers are very highly optimized in the code they output, except in certain circumstances. Which is why a lot of languages allow inlining assembly. BASIC and Pascal are called by many a beginners language, but both can be expanded well beyond those boundaries. Choosing a compiler is important as they all have their own little qwirks for the language they are compiling too.
I agree, and what I meant was that few write complete programs in assembly. The inline feature is indeed the way to go to optimize custom routines.
Be welcome!
. And then it depends on what CPU you are assembling for. As for programming, there are hundreds of tutorials on hundreds of different programming languages. Pascal, Object Pascal, C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, Cobol, Ada, Cold fusion, Basica, GW-Basic, QBasic, Visual Basic, Business Basics (TBred, BBx), C#. And this is just a small handful of languages. Where would you like to start? Mr Mouse, is mainly a hobby coder and is experienced in Visual Basic, as where myself, I use Object Pascal/C/C++, the most, although it depends on what i need to accomplish.