We used to always joke about making an IDE for TASM... "Here little kid, here is a loaded gun, now go play with it on the center line of the highway!"
I started at Borland right around Turbo C 2.0, so I predated the OOP versions. I worked with early versions of Turbo Basic. I contributed to the design of the VMT tables for the first version of Turbo Pascal With Objects... And, did you notice the OOP support even in TASM? I did a lot of design work on that, probably the only assembler to have OOP... Back then the piece of software I really wanted to have was the PLINK overlay linker... Every now and then I think about writing some assembly, but then decide that doing CGI scripts in assembly language is probably not a real effective use of anyone's time!
Back in the days of the Borland DOS UI's, every major version of the Borland products had a different color scheme. You could tell at a distance what someone was running.... Each new major version, we'd have to decide on the new color scheme, we called that decision group the "Helen Keller Committee". That's pretty much the limit of my graphic design credentials!
However, if you ever have the desire to breadboard something and do something low level, like I do occasionally, check out the Propeller chip http://www.parallax.com/tabid/407/Default.aspx and the Hydra Game Development Kit I picked one up at Frys a while back. It's pretty amazing, no CRT controller, no sound controller, it's all handled in software from different cores of the 8 core (cog) microprocessor. The book gives examples of how to do various kinds of simple classic arcade games. The processor directly understands a high level Basic like language as well as an odd assembly language, with some unique bank switching and memory access sharing by the cogs.
- Garnet
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