Retrochallenge 2009 Summer Challenge Entry

      Retrochallenge 2009
      Summer Challenge
      Mark Wickens
      31-Jul-2009

                                         Conclusions

      Well, I haven't had time to make any final modifications, so my program is as it
      stands now. You can view it in text mode[1] or as a colourized pdf[2] (courtesy
      of the assembly-macro32 mode I wrote for jEdit[3]. I knew it would come in handy
      at some point!)

      I thought I'd like programming in Macro-32 and this challenge has proven me
      right. It reminds me of when I made the transition from C to Java. Java
      surprised me because for the most part when I wrote a program and compiled it
      the program worked first time. The highly-orthogonal nature of Macro-32 means
      that most of the time my code assembled first time. Sometimes I got the wrong
      addressing mode, but I never got an 'addressing mode not supported' problem. The
      operation names seemed to be fairly intuitive after a while aswell.

      The hardest problem I had to overcome was the comparitive lack of example
      programs written in Macro-32. One google search I made brought up my website in
      the first page of matches - I guess that's when you know you're going to be
      largely on your own. The two examples I did use were the one on the '99 bottles
      of beer' website[4] (highly recommended viewing) and Jim Duff's excellent
      website[5] which contains numerous code examples for OpenVMS, a couple of which
      are in Macro-32. I struggled to find any code examples for definining a
      multi-parameter procedure. I got there in the end by figuring it out. Thanks
      should also go to the Hoff[6] who is the fount of all OpenVMS-related knowledge
      and provided intelligent answers via IRC to my arcane VAX macro questions.

      The following code is worth a mention:

              ;---------------------------------------------------
              ; Convert long to string
              ;       R2 contains long value to convert
              ;       R3 contains number of digits in output
              ;       R4 contains address to store leading separate numeric value
              CVTLS:  CVTLP   R2,LONG_SIZE,PKD
                      CVTPS   LONG_SIZE,PKD,LONG_SIZE,(R4)
                      RSB

      The two instructions highlighted in bold convert a binary long value to a string
      representation. This is a good example of the power of VAX Macro-32. The first
      instruction, CVTLP converts a binary long into a packed decimal representation.
      The second instruction CVTPS takes that packed decimal value and converts it to
      a 'leading separate numeric' format which is a signed integer value in ASCII,
      such as +1234 or -9876. This is pretty high level stuff for assembly language!

      The VAX has once again performed flawlessly. Big thanks to the other competitors
      for providing entertaining blogs.

      OUTSTANDING PROBLEMS

      1. One of my original ideas was to include terminal-based output to provide a
         fast zooming display of the fractal (obviously at fairly low resolution) and
         this is something I'd like to get working at some point. I'd probably need to
         use a different generating function however given the sparseness of the
         images generated using the 'chaotic swirls' algorithm.

      2. I've yet to add command line parameters which would make the program much
         more user friendly and also provide the possiblity of running the program in
         batch mode.

      3. The ASCII based PGM file format uses a lot of space, so ideally I'd like to
         modify the program to generate the binary version of PGM.

      NEXT STEPS

      I'm now going to rewrite the whole program in multi-threaded Scala[7]. This is
      sort of an anti-retrochallenge.

      Thoughts for the 2010 winter retrochallenge are turning towards a hardware
      oriented challenge. Probably incorporating a large number of seven-segment
      displays and a Motorola 68000 Single Board Computer.

      ENDNOTES

      1. mbrt1.mar

      2. mbrt1.pdf

      3. jEdit Text Editor

      4. 99 Bottles of Beer

      5. eight-cubed

      6. Hoffman Labs

      7. The SCALA Programming Language