Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

Hi

I've spent the last couple of months transcribing Toni Baker's "Mastering Machine Code on Your ZX81 or ZX80" from a PDF to HTML. The freely downloadable PDF I found on World of Spectrum.

I did this because I wanted to read the book to learn how to write machine code programs, but also I wanted to be able read it on a portable device where a 21MB PDF of images isn't such a good idea. Therefore I have made an effort to minimise the width of the pre-formatted code sections for reduced width browsers and for text browsers such as lynx. I've also replaced the illustrations with ASCII text versions for the latter.

Additionally I've fixed the errors/bugs, or the ones that I've managed to find. The only program I haven't managed to get working so far is Draughts (it's not complete anyway), and I was OK up until Draughts Two but something happened when adding the final code from Draughts Three. Anyway, I've typed-in all the programs from the book and I'm offering them for download.

I don't have permission from the author Toni Baker to publish her book on my website but I am assuming that she won't mind or will possibly be pleased that I've given it a free revision If she is reading this post I would appreciate it if she could let me know what she thinks.

So, the book is available here -> http://www.users.waitrose.com/~thunor/mmcoyzx81/
The licences [of my work] are here -> http://www.users.waitrose.com/~thunor/m ... OPYING.txt
Program downloads and screenshots are here -> http://www.users.waitrose.com/~thunor/m ... loads.html

Regards,
Thunor Sif Ese

Thanks for your efforts!

You're welcome

Now that it's in a finished state (although it will receive updates and I want to index it more thoroughly) I've found it to be very useful. You can have the Dictionary of Machine Code open on one browser tab, the Hex to Assembly, System Variables, Character Set and one of the big listings -- for example code -- open on other tabs with your favourite emulator and you have everything you need

I've been reading through it on my Sharp Zaurus where I also have an SDL version of z81 too. Great fun.

[EDIT]
If anyone reading has yet to learn machine code programming on the ZX81, I can recommend a simple but useful hex loader from the book -- lenslist2 -- which is an enhanced version of Toni Baker's HEXLD3. It's a good program to start with if an assembler like ZXAS scares you :p

Regards,
Thunor

I must admit that this is a very useful step and will hopefully encourage more people to give Z80 machine code at least a try...

Hello

I've coded the disassembler algorithm from chapter 16



Listing: http://www.users.waitrose.com/~thunor/m ... isasm.html
Download: http://www.users.waitrose.com/~thunor/m ... f-disasm.p

I'm not exactly sure how big the disassembler is because I wrote the program to be easily relocatable i.e. I refrained from using absolute addresses and implemented a relocation table so that it can relocate itself from an address poked in by the calling infrastructure. In total it's 2966 bytes and I'm guessing that the disassembler part is somewhere between 2KB and 2.5KB. I wrote it using a modified HEXLD3 hex loader from the book and so the disassembler comes packaged with it.

I wrote this by hand within the html document it resides, and so I'm still using the near assembly style that the book uses, but an assembler source file could be created from the listing with a little effort - not something I personally need, but somebody might want it.

Regards,
Thunor

Looks like the listing isn't working anymore.

These links may help:

Book
http://www.nonowt.com/magfold/mmcode/mmcdindex.html

Downloads
http://www.nonowt.com/magfold/mmcode/download.html (disassembler at bottom of page)

Awesome, thanks!