h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hmm, I don't think learning assembler would help...

If a graphics algorithm is bog-standard, rather than being highly efficient, there could be a hundred or a thousand times difference in performance.

I find it hard to imagine switching from C++ to assembler could gain you more than a factor of, say, four or five... and it seems more likely you'd gain one-two.

The way to get good graphics algorithms is to either:

1. Spend ages working out how to make them efficient; maths degree useful
2. Look up well-known efficient versions
3. Use hardware to do it for you

Assembler is certainly not the last word in fast computing...

Was playing that Habbo Hotel thing the other day. It looked promising but unfortunately seems to be full of rowdy teenagers with nothing better to do than swear at each other and be rude. So I left.

Always the case,

Agreed that normaly you need to have a brain to do usefull things in assembler, but how many assembler programmers do you know that do 'mov eax,0'

You could always do inline assembler for the loopable stuf, very usefull when it comes to loops. if you know what your doing.

Then again, if you just want to see IF you can do it, then why bother learning a new lanuage, it won't get to an end user, so no loss realy.

-- DoctorMO --

Always the case,

Agreed that normaly you need to have a brain to do usefull things in assembler, but how many assembler programmers do you know that do 'mov eax,0'

You could always do inline assembler for the loopable stuf, very usefull when it comes to loops. if you know what your doing.

Then again, if you just want to see IF you can do it, then why bother learning a new lanuage, it won't get to an end user, so no loss realy.

-- DoctorMO --

my thoughts exactly... well, sorta
anyway, that's really sad about those stupid humans with their swear words. the isometric style looked promising, too
what does 'mov eax,0' do?
so e a and x are registers and there is a command called mov that prolly stands for move
but what is the other parameter for? the 0?
i made a cool 2-d version of a sphereflake and it was the first program i ever wrote that ran too fast
YAY!
i also had a really cool gravity sim that had 256 particles that start in a circle with velocities pointing outward and because of some mistakes i made, such as updating one before checking the next, it isn't totally boring
they could even leav trails!
>8^B

'mov eax, 0' sets the register eax to the value 0, but it takes less bytes worth of instructions to do 'sub eax, eax' or 'xor eax, eax'

I knew you knew somthing of the subject

-- DoctorMO --

I belive 'xor eax, eax' is the fastist, taken the minium number of cycles.

Btw, you may find this of interest too, specifically the bit on partial stalls:

http://x86.ddj.com/ftp/manuals/686/p6tips.pdf

Stupid PDFs, what a pain to load in linux (or windows for me because I never install Acrobat) *mad*

-- DoctorMO --

I finally got Linux(Red Hat 8.0, of course)!
I'm even online!
Now I just have to get used to the differences between DOS and the Terminal and the differences between programming for Windows and Linux
>8^B

Cool ...

RedHat 8.0 is quite nice, I have that running on a box at home...

Once you find out how powerful the Unix terminal is, you'll never want to go back to DOS...

(few quick hints: tab for completion is immensely useful... ctrl-r to search for something you've typed recently, just type the first few letters... ls -rt will list recently files, and ls -al will list everything with details... and be very careful if using root!...)

Hmm, PDFs a problem?... but you can get acrobat, or xpdf, and both of those read 'em perfectly well...

You might want to install a more recent version of gcc if you've got RedHat 8.0, the version they included is a slightly weird release (earlier and later versions are fine, but the one they put on is a bit odd). At least, I've had problems with it.

I recently found out that the command window in WinXP has tab completion, which is nice.

Ooo, tab compleation, I like that, almost a year with linuc, and I didn't know any of those things

I'm going to have to get RetHat, SuSE is pigging me off, dumb installs and wierd X11 config, never works right.

-- DoctorMO --

all of this goes over my head right now
except tab completion
i think i understand that
lol
>8^B

Well I got rid of SuSE, now I'm holding my breath waiting for Somthing else, I need my Apatche Back! Wah!

-- DoctorMO --

*A great flying ship approaches. Not a spaceship but a genuine old rigging & sails ship.... just as you're thinking thoughts along the lines of 'how quaint', a zapping noise exactly like the noise of a photon torpedo being fired is heard and a huge explosion flowers nearby. The Ragnorak Pirates of the Bad ship Falconer have arrived!*

AAaaaarrr!!!! Hand over *looks momentarily confused by all the computer jargon* whatever you've got!!!

WTF?

Aaarr, hand... it over!
Now!