2019

Starting MSX Assembly part 3

Published at June 1, 2019 ·  8 min read

So we’ve seen how we can call the BIOS and how to use an assembler to create a file which can be BLOAD’ed and run on an (emulated) MSX. So now that is out of the way, lets do the mother of all tutorials: Hello world!

This can be pretty hard to start with if you want to do this in screen 2 of the MSX. But let’s do this in screen 0 because then we can get some help from the BIOS. The BIOS has a nice call that can display a character on the screen called CHPUT. There are a lot of resources which list all the BIOS calls, e.g. http://map.grauw.nl/resources/msxbios.php , so of you want to get an overview of all the BIOS calls, start reading those ;)

Fietselfstedentocht

Published at June 1, 2019 ·  2 min read

So next week is the “fietselfstedentocht”, roughly translated at “11 city cycling tour”. Originally an ice (speed) skating event of about 200km long. By bike this is about 235km which have to be completed in a day. For me, 235km is a thing. I hope I survive ;) The most I have done on my racingbike is 115km by myself. That took about 4.5 hours including some rest.

Why would I ride such a distance in a day you might ask? For 2 reasons actually. The first is that I was asked to join this event as parts of Simon’s peleton/platoon. A group of people trying to raise money for Support Casper. The group is named after my father who passed away about a year ago due to pancreas cancer. Casper van Eijk is doing new research because this type of cancer usually means you won’t survive. A cycling buddy of my father started this group, asked me to join, and eventually asked me to join the fietselfstedentocht.

Starting MSX assembly part 2

Published at May 11, 2019 ·  2 min read

So, in the previous post we started with a small assembly program to produce a beep:

    db $FE     ; magic number
    dw Begin    ; begin address of the program
    dw End - 1  ; end address of the program
    dw Execute  ; program execution address (for ,R option)

    org $C000   ; The program start at C000h in the MSX's RAM
Begin:
Execute:
    CALL $C0  ; Call the BEEP bios routine
    ret
End:

What I did not talk about was how to actually use an assembler to create an actual file which the MSX can execute. So let’s do that now.

Simon's peleton

Published at May 8, 2019 ·  1 min read

Simon’s Peleton: We gae deur. It giet oan. (Post is in Dutch…)

Oftewel: Een stel zeeuwen die de fietselfstedentocht gaat fietsen om geld in te zamelen voor Support Casper

https://www.supportcasper-acties.nl/actie/paul-bosselaar

Op 1 maart vorig jaar hebben we afscheid moesten namen van mijn vader Simon. Het gevecht tegen alvleesklierkanker kon hij niet winnen. Wij willen zijn arts Casper van Eijck van het Erasmus UMC steunen door geld op te halen voor baanbrekend onderzoek. Simon’s peloton bestaat uit vrienden, collega’s en familie van mijn vader die samen gaan fietsen om geld op te halen voor Support Casper. We gaan o.a. de uitdaging aan de fietselfstedentoch uit te rijden en om 1000 km in 8 dagen tijd te fietsen door 12 provincies.

Starting MSX assembly part 1

Published at May 5, 2019 ·  4 min read

I somehow get the feeling every now and then that more people want to know how to program things for old computers. Since I still have a working MSX and still sometimes program for it, let’s see if I can create some tutorials.

Assembler

The MSX has a Z80 processor on board. So you need a Z80 assembler if you want to program in assembly. You can use an assembler on the MSX like Wbass-2 or Compass, or you can use a PC or Mac for cross-development and use something like Sjasm or Glass. For now I wont be covering how to use an assembler. Instead I’ll focus on assembly and the MSX bios at first.

New website

Published at May 4, 2019 ·  4 min read

For some time now I wanted to really start with a new site/blog. With all the stuff that happened since 2018 I felt the need to write stuff down and to be more open then before. So to actually do that, I started this blog.

Being a software developer I wanted to create it myself of cource. So the first thing to do was to search for software or a framework to create the site in. One of the most common pieces of software to create a site or blog is Wordpress. And being the opiniated developer that I am, I quite dislike Wordpress. Why? Well, creating a good site in Wordpress can be harder then you might think. Wordpress itself simply does not have the functionality you actually need to get most things done. So you need to install 3rd party plugins to get the functionality that you need or create your own. Since my coding is mostly done in Java and Wordpress is PHP I do not like to code my own and it would take too much time to get a site up and running. Plugins are not always of the same quality and using more and more plugins will make Wordpress slow so even a lot of simple / small sites needs things like a caching plugin or even a CDN to get a speedy website.