Welcome to the world of assembly language programming for the ATARI computers. By now, you've no doubt tried your hand at programming your ATARI in BASIC and found it to be a very easy-to-use and powerful language. But you've also probably found some things that just can't be done in BASIC, and you know that all of the excellent real-time action games and the fast sorts and searches are all programmed in some mysterious language called machine language. The purpose of this book is to teach you how to program your ATARI in the fastest, most powerful and versatile language available, assembly language. By working your way through this book, you will learn how to use all of the sophisticated and powerful resources of one of the most impressive home computers, the ATARI.
Most of the examples in this book will be related to BASIC, so an understanding of BASIC will be important to the understanding of this book. However, many types of programs that can be written in assembly language simply have no counterparts in BASIC, and so for these no such examples will be possible. Problems will be presented throughout the book and it is highly recommended that you try to work them out for yourself. In each case the answers will be presented and discussed, in order to help you if you are having trouble.
VARIETIES OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
At a very fundamental level, your ATARI really only understands one programming language, which is called machine language, the language of the computing machine. A typical machine language program might look like this:
1011010110100101.....
Now, before you put this book down and go back to BASIC, let's understand one thing right away: virtually no one programs directly in machine language. Even the many programs advertised as being written in "100% machine language" weren't; they were written in assembly language and then translated into machine language. But all computer languages must at some time be translated into machine language in order to be executed, even BASIC. That's right, the central "brain" of your ATARI computer doesn't even really understand BASIC.
BASIC:
AN INTERPRETED LANGUAGE
Let's spend a moment discussing how a BASIC program is executed, in an effort to understand better what assembly and machine language really are, and how they differ.
Let's first write a very simple BASIC program:
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 FOR I= 1 TO 200
30 NEXT I
40 PRINT "GOODBYE"
50 END
If we now type RUN and hit the RETURN key, we know that the word HELLO will appear on our TV or monitor screen and, after a brief pause, the word GOODBYE will appear directly below it, followed several lines later by the word READY But exactly how does this happen?
The cartridge containing ATARI BASIC is actually more properly called the ATARI BASIC Interpreter. An interpreter, just like the noncomputer use of the word, is someone or something that translates information from one form into another, whether from English into Russian, or from BASIC into some other language. In our case, the BASIC cartridge contains a program that can translate BASIC keywords into a form understandable to our computer's "brain" Let's see how.
As we type line 10, the word PRINT is translated to a code for the word PRINT, called a token. This process is called tokenizing your BASIC program, and is done as you type each line into your ATARI, and hit RETURN. It is this process that simultaneously checks the syntax, or grammar rules, to be sure that you typed the line correctly. If not, you'll see the familiar ERROR statement immediately after typing the line, and you then can correct your mistakes before proceeding. This ensures that when the BASIC cartridge begins interpreting your program, it may have logical errors to deal with, but at least each line is internally correct.
Having completely typed the above program, we would then type RUN and press RETURN, which would begin the interpretation of the program. The first thing this interpreter knows is that the beginning of the program, the place it must start when the word RUN is typed, is the lowest-numbered line of the BASIC program. Actually, before it ever gets there, it does quite a bit of housekeeping, such as setting all variables used in your program to zero, canceling out any previously used strings or arrays, and many other functions. Then it turns its attention to line 10, which is converted into machine language by means of something called a jump table, about which we'll learn a great deal in Chapter 9. In any case, first line 10 is translated, then it is executed, and then the machine language code is thrown away, to make room for the next line, line 20. The process of translation, execution, and discarding is repeated for line 20 and then again for line 30, and so on.
Having now executed the entire program, and seen the READY prompt that tells us that BASIC is ready for new instructions, what do you suppose will happen if we type RUN again? Right! The entire process of translating, executing, and discarding each line will be repeated all over again. Then we'll see the READY prompt again. In fact, this entire process will occur as many times as we choose to type the word RUN. As you can no doubt see, this is a very wasteful process. BASIC continues to repeat over and over two of the three steps which are not actually needed to run the program, translation and the discarding of information. If we could only get away from the need for these two steps, imagine how fast our program would execute. After all, if we get rid of these two steps, the only one left is execution.
ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE:
AN ASSEMBLED LANGUAGE
Now you know the purpose of assembly language programming! When we program in assembly language, by using a translator known as an assembler, we can produce the executable machine language code which we can store, and which the computer can execute directly. We translate it only once and we don't discard it at all, so we get maximum efficiency, and therefore, maximum speed. And that's the real benefit of assembly language programming, speed. In fact, it is possible to write a program in assembly language which will execute over 1000 times faster than its BASIC equivalent! For arcade games, and very time-consuming processes like moving blocks of memory around, searches, sorts and other such procedures, assembly language programming can be absolutely indispensable.
The other major advantage of assembly language is the absolute control it gives the programmer over the computer. In BASIC, the programmer is often separated from the nuts-and-bolts hardware of the computer and doesn't have detailed control over many of its functions. This control is available only through assembly language programming.
INTERPRETED VERSUS ASSEMBLED LANGUAGES
These are the advantages of assembly language programming: speed and control. How about the disadvantages? First, of course, is the need to learn a new computer language. This book will enable you to do that. Second, ATARI BASIC is an interpreted language, while assembly language is not. This becomes important when you need to make changes in a program. In BASIC, you simply make the change and rerun the program. For example, to change the above program, we might simply type:
40 PRINT "GOODBYE";
50 PRINT "Y'ALL"
60 END
Now when we run the program, it will say GOODBYE Y'ALL instead of just GOODBYE, as above. The entire change in the program might take 15 seconds for a very slow typist. This flexibility is a great advantage of interpreted languages. To make a similar change in an assembly language program would require much more typing, and then the program would have to be reassembled. This assembly process, converting the assembly language program to machine language, sometimes takes 15 minutes or more, depending on the size of the program and the assembler used. Of course, our example is very short and would not take this much time, but the point is that making even a very simple change to an assembly language program might take quite a while, and if you make a mistake, you'll need to repeat the process all over again!
A third disadvantage of assembly language is the amount of programming you'll need to do to accomplish even the simplest tasks. For instance, the PRINT statement in BASIC, which requires you to type only one word, might require 20 or 30 lines of programming in assembly language. For this reason, assembly language programs are usually very long.
The fourth, and last, disadvantage of assembly language is the difficulty of understanding a printout of the program. Certainly the PRINT statement in BASIC is far more understandable than a series of instructions such as:
LDA #$01
STA CRSINH
or something equally obtuse. This problem can and should be overcome by all good assembly language programmers by the inclusion of comments on virtually every line. Comments are the assembly language equivalent of REM statements in BASIC: they help the programmer to remember what it was he or she was trying to accomplish with a given line. Certainly the above example makes somewhat more sense when presented below with comments, even to someone who doesn't understand assembly language at all.
LDA #$01 ;to inhibit cursor
STA CRSINH ;poke a 1 here
Now perhaps it's more understandable that when we see a program advertised as written in "100% machine language," what is really meant is that it was written in assembly language, and then translated once from its final form into machine language, which is the form in which it is being sold. Such programs generally are much faster to execute than BASIC programs, and the additional control the programmer has over the computer allows special effects not attainable from BASIC.
There is an additional distinction between BASIC and assembly language. BASIC belongs to a family of programming languages which are referred to as high-level languages. This nomenclature refers to the ability of one simple statement to perform quite a complicated task, such as the PRINT example used above. In a sense, this ease of programming also isolates the programmer from the hardware, placing him or her at arm's length, so to speak. It is from this view of languages such as BASIC that the term high-level language arose. Among thousands of other high-level languages are Pascal, FORTRAN, PILOT and Ada. In contrast to these, languages such as machine language or assembly language are referred to as low-level languages, because to program using them requires an understanding of the hardware and an ability to get into the real guts of the machine for which you are programming.
WORKING WITH ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE
In order to convert an assembly language program to machine language, we must use another program, called an assembler. There are a number of excellent assemblers available for the ATARI computers, and the techniques used in this book will work with any of them. Chapter 6 is devoted to the syntax and special functions of each assembler, but the assembly language programs listed in this book were produced using the Assembler/Editor cartridge from ATARI. Chapter 6 specifies all of the changes required to use these programs with each of the other assemblers.
COMPILERS
There is another way to convert programs to machine language. A compiler is a program which converts a program written in a high level language such as BASIC to machine language. These compilers generally convert the entire program all at once, in contrast to an interpreter, which translates each line one at a time. The converted program created by the compiler can then be run without a BASIC cartridge installed, and will generally be from five to ten times faster than the original BASIC program. Why only five to ten times? These compilers are very complex programs, which must take into account every possible combination of BASIC commands anyone might write. Therefore, they create machine language code which performs all of the correct steps in the original program, but they cannot optimize the code produced. Therefore, in general, programs written in assembly language and assembled into machine language will execute much faster than the same program written in BASIC and compiled.
The other major disadvantage of compiled code is its size. For instance, some of the subroutines in Chapter 7 are about 100 bytes long. The same routines written in BASIC and compiled could be as long as 8000 bytes! It would be very hard to use these as subroutines in a BASIC program as we do in Chapter 7.
TERMINOLOGY
Before we go on, let's talk about a number of terms that are frequently used by programmers. It's the jargon of their trade. Just so we all are speaking the same language, then, let's briefly review some of them. When we speak about computer memory, we frequently hear the terms ROM and RAM mentioned. ROM stands for Read-Only Memory, and memory of this type can be read but not written to. For instance, in the ATARI, all memory locations higher than 49152 are ROM, and although in BASIC we can PEEK them to see what is stored there, we cannot POKE new values into them. "But what about player-missile graphics?" you may ask. "We POKE memory locations higher than this all the time!"
True, but if you were to then PEEK at that location, you would find that you hadn't really changed anything at all. The value stored in that location is not changed by such POKEs. It is the act of writing to that address which causes the changes you see in player-missile graphics or other applications requiring writing to memory locations above 49152.
This is in direct contrast to RAM, which stands for Random-Access Memory. Actually, both ROM and RAM are random-access, and RAM should more properly be called Read-Write Memory; but since RWM is unpronounceable, RAM has become the accepted term. The term random access refers to the method by which information is accessed, and is to be contrasted with sequential access, the other major method of storage. Sequential access can best be envisioned by imagining an audio tape. In order to play a song in the middle of the tape, you must somehow scan through the entire first portion of the tape, either by playing it or by using the fast-forward key. In contrast, think of a phonograph record. To play the middle song on a side, we simply lift up the tone arm and bring it down on the song we want, which immediately begins playing. We have not had to go through any other songs to get to that one. The audio tape is a sequential-access device, as is a computer tape, such as the ATARI 410 program recorder, and the phonograph record is a random-access device, as is a computer disk, such as that used in the ATARI 810 disk drive.
The next terms, with which you may or may not be familiar, are OS and DOS. OS stands for Operating System, and your ATARI has one of the best operating systems of any microcomputer. The operating system is contained in ROM (Remember? Read-Only Memory!) in your computer, and is responsible for controlling almost everything that happens inside your ATARI. Without the operating system, nothing would happen when you turned on your computer. The operating system has complete control over every facet of computing. We'll learn how to interact with this fine operating system in considerable detail as we work our way through this book.
Perhaps it should be said that the ATARI has several of the best operating systems of the popular microcomputers, since the operating system for the 400 and 800 is slightly different from that of the 1200XL, which in turn is slightly different from that of the 600XL, the 800XL, and the 1450XLD. In fact, even the 400 and 800 had two different versions of their operating systems, the so-called A and B ROMs! How are we to begin programming for so many different operating systems?
This is the nicest part about the operating system for the ATARI computers. ATARI has guaranteed that certain vectors in the operating system will never change. A vector is a signpost, a directional indicator. It tells us how to find particular routines or where to find a certain part of the operating system. With this information, it is possible to write a program which will work not only on our 400 or 800 or on an 800XL, but even on generations of ATARI computers which ATARI themselves have not yet dreamed of producing!
There are a number of shortcuts around these vectors available in the ATARI computers, but there is no guarantee that programs which use these shortcuts will work on all ATARIs. For this reason, they are strongly not recommended for general use. Of course, if you're just writing a quick and dirty subroutine for your own program, to use on only your computer, these shortcuts are useful, but many programs written in assembly language have failed as soon as new operating systems were made available by ATARI. In one case, such lack of foresight has even caused the untimely demise of a third-party software house, so if you're contemplating selling what you write, be sure to obey the rules.
The related term, DOS, stands for Disk Operating System. This is the program that controls any disk drives which may be connected to your ATARI. It actually consists of two parts, DOS.SYS and DUP.SYS. The DOS.SYS portion of DOS is loaded into your computer when you first turn it on, and is always present. The DUP.SYS portion of DOS is only loaded when you type DOS from the keyboard. It contains the familiar DOS menu allowing many of the usual file manipulation commands, such as copying disks, saving areas of memory, formatting disks, and many others. You should note that there are no guaranteed vectors in DOS, although so much software depends on certain locations that changes in these would have to be considered unlikely. But you never can tell.
Now that you know the difference between languages, and between interpreters, assemblers, and compilers, we'll next explore the various numbering systems used by our computers.
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