CHAPTER 1 AN INTRODUCTION A brief summary of the book.
CHAPTER 2 INTRODUCTION TO HEXADECIMAL AND MACHINE CODE Computers count in sixteens, not tens. This system is called hexadecimal, and is quite useful to know.
CHAPTER 3 SIMPLE ARITHMETIC “Simple” means very simple! Plusses and minuses only. Division and multiplication are left till later!
CHAPTER 4 PEEKING AND POKEING AND MORE ABOUT LOADING An explanation of how to use memory in RAM. A “SCROLL Backwards” program is included to demonstrate this.
CHAPTER 5 MORE PLACES TO STORE MACHINE CODE A very explicit guide to the use of REM statements, variables, area, and protected regions of RAM.
CHAPTER 6 STACKING AND JUMPING How to use the stack to store data. Jumping and conditional jumping, and the use of subroutines explained.
CHAPTER 7 PRINTING THINGS ON THE SCREEN In BASIC the PRINT statement is perhaps the most widely used instruction of all. Here’s how to use it in machine code.
CHAPTER 8 A DICTIONARY OF MACHINE CODE All the instructions. A complete explanation of every single machine language instruction used by the T/S 1500.
CHAPTER 9 A PROGRAM TO HELP YOU DEBUG A machine code editing program, itself written largely in machine code. The speed it offers is likely to make your fluency in machine code develop very rapidly.
CHAPTER 10 SCANNING THE KEYBOARD Using the keyboard in programs has obvious advantages. Here we cover the function INKEYs for the NEW ROM and explain how to recreate it on the OLD. An elegant little program called GRAFFITTI is developed which shows how the character set is generated.
CHAPTER 11 CHECKERS – PART ONE The first part of this program, which allows a player to input a move, and checks for cheats!
CHAPTER 12 A TOUCH OF CULTURE Music and pictures. Music from the keyboard, and pictures from the screen. Watch out for the program LIFE.
CHAPTER 13 CHECKERS – PART TWO The output of the computer’s move. This section does not decide upon a move to make; it merely outputs a move assuming the decision has been made already.
CHAPTER 14 GRAPHICS GAMES A section intended only for the T/S 1500 because the games included here rely on the SLOW mechanism. (And in machine code the word “SLOW” should absolutely not be taken literally.)
CHAPTER 15 CHECKERS – PART THREE The making of the big decision. . . . Which move to choose.
CHAPTER 16 HOW TO DISASSEMBLE THE ROM The ROM holds many secrets, but it and any other machine code program may be disassembled fairly simply. A hex-listing program is given, and an outline as to how a full disassemble-program may be written is also given.
CHAPTER 17 ARITHMETIC SUBROUTINES Have you ever wondered how floating point numbers work in machine code? How you can add and subtract them? Multiply and divide them? Even take sines and cosines!? This chapter will tell you how.
APPENDIXES Useful information you might need when writing programs.
