Quote:
Originally Posted by Grant Stockly
Paul, what kinds of other programs have you made? What resources did you used to do it? Any tips and hints for other people in your situation?  |
Nothing really earth shattering because we are dealing with switches and lights. All the things I did were of the nature: switch in some data, run the program, view the results. I wanted to learn the language a bit. I wrote a program that would fetch numbers from memory until it found 777 and then store the sum; I copied a program form a book that would multiply two numbers but it was rather laborious and error prone; I experimented with boolean logic (and/or) and looping.
All that was pretty boring and I don't really have any tips to offer. I made lots of mistakes in loading the programs through the switches.
I played around with the am radio program and made a few different tunes, including the first half of Happy Birthday. I would recommend anyone who has a musical ear try that one. I would key in the song data, run the program, hear any notes that were not right, and quickly fix just the relevant notes until the pitch was correct. Musical trial and error.
Perhaps now that I understand how to input data from the serial IO card I will try to capture the keystrokes that come in and store them in memory somewhere to create the tone sequences for songs instead of manually loading successive memory locations with the relevant values. It is probably even straightforward enough to make the altair play tones as I press keys and I might try that as well.
These are just some ideas to get some fun out of the work done so far. Nothing earthshattering, just basics.
Paul