Earxtutchap1

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                       | | CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION | |
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First off all I'd like to dedicate this to all of the atariscene. The scene is
very important to me and I'd just like to give this weird textfile as a gift
to all of you that have supported me in the last years and all that just enjoy
working with their atari a lot. You know who you are and I love you!

The basic reason this book was put up is that we have many coder wannabe's in
the scene. People who are fresh and enthousiastic. But these people need help
from their older, more experienced coders and some good books. In the past
there weren't any good books about the coding demos/games on the ST. Only one
in German and that's all. So that's where this, freeware textfile comes in.

OK, what I'm going to tell you might be dissapointing to some people that
read my first 'book', but this is going to be far more technical. I made
the first book to let people see what making Atari games was about. It gave
information about how you should start off and what you should expect and
what the Atari had to offer a games-designer. It didn't expect you to have
any programming skills.

This book however expects of you that you know a bit of assembler code. It is
probably best suited to people that have been doing assembler a few months. It
probably offers something for more experienced 680x0 coders too. Don't think
this book is meant for all you programmers dead serious about doing GEM,
databases or whatever. It's all about smart code, trickery and basicly using
dirty tricks. (I hate working with the stack =) Hi Cspion! ;-))

There'll be some explanation of much used demo and game effects and I hope to
include most atari specific stuff about implementation of these. Also some DSP
stuff, just for the really curious guys.

For those that know absolutely zip about assembler and coding, there's some
appendices especially for you. These explain most basic stuff you absolutely
need to know about.

Well, what you'll see in here is a lot about constructing 'handy' game/demo-
routines. A large part is also devoted to making fast loops, which is an very
important matter when writing stuff on Atari (unless you've got a fast TT,
souped up Falcon or a clone).

At the end of each chapter there is a little summary of what some things in the
chapter were about. Also at the end of the book there are complete sourcecodes
for explaining how hardware registers work and how optimised code will look,
etc.

OK, there's not much left to say.. Enjoy, and oh.. I almost forgot. This book
may be freely copied!

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