Monday, August 5, 2024

Delivered Craps game, now porting TicTacToe from Fortran to assembler in demo system

TESTED AND PUBLISHED DEMO 7 - CRAPS GAME

I put it through all its paces and verified correct operation. It was then packaged up as a load file to add into the demo monitor system to active switch 7 for this program. 

NOW PORTING TIC TAC TOE

The museum liked the interactive Tic Tac Toe game but the one they were using, compiled under Fortran, depends on DMS2 monitor routines and fortran library subroutines, which are not available when running on bare metal such as the Demo monitor. 

I began converting each module. It uses named COMMON variables, which I can mimic by putting all the separate source files from Fortran into one large assembler file so they have accessibility by name. This requires some jostling of name spaces to avoid collisions of variable names between the different source files in Fortran. 

This is feasible because this program only uses integer arithmetic, something that matches the native CPU architecture and is easily translated. Other programs that use the Floating Point data type would be much more difficult to port as I would need to recreate the entire FP system myself - subroutines for all the math operations plus define the storage format for variables. 

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