From: Reinier Zwitserloot 
Subject: Re: 3D game engine for PB?
 
Simple answer: duh, no! TASM and MASM were designed with 100% assembly
development in mind. NASM is slightly different, because unlike
TASM/MASM NASM uses virtually no 'red tape' and can out just about any
format existing, rather than relying on a linker to do that for them.
 
My program, PBPLUS, uses this to it's advantage by using NASM to
translate any old assembler (MMX,686, cyrix, undocumented, nasm has all
of them) opcode into it's binary code and inserting that verbatim into
PB using !DB. NASM will also make .OBJs you can link straight into your
PB code without problems. The incompatibility comes up when you want to
reference *PB* subroutines in the *ASM* code rather than accessing your
asm subroutines in PB. For example, I was writing a BMP viewer in NASM
for PB (Done, if you want it e-mail me) and my plan was to support
supplying a string as parameter to view one. In order to do that you
need to use PB's internal string routines, which count as my asm program
trying to access PB's subs. *THAT* doesn't work. Now You'll have to give
a pointer to a NULL terminated string (using STRPTR32). You can use
ASCIIZ on PB v3.5 or just CHR$(0) for PB v3.2 and below.
 
If you plan on accessing PB routines from powerbasic (your own, or the
string routines, those are the only ones, pretty much) then I'd advise
you to wait a while and see if either PB fixes this or if Simon and
Julian add an option to generate the 32-bit fixup, or I finish my object
compiler which can translate any object file to any output form..
including OBJ again. I hope one of the three will be out sometime soon.
 
Guy Macon wrote:
>
> In article , 
R.Zwitserloot@antispam.BTInternet.com (Reinier Zwitserloot) wrote:
>
> >Newsgroup traffic is one source. More than half tend to use NASM, then
> >most vote for TASM. Few use MASM. That's mostly the amateur crowd,
> >however. More use of TASM than MASM is a bit more obvious. TASM is
> >faster, better, (Emulates MASM -AND- has IDEAL mode), and the binaries
> >considerably smaller. I most definitely agree that most companies who do
> >development have MASM *IF* they don't usually use assembler, only really
> >bought it to have an assembler. However, as to people actually using
> >assembler, TASM is the fairly obvious buy.
>
> My situation is that I do everything in PBasic (for the Basic Stamp) or
> PowerBasic (for the PC) with an ocasional dive into a short loop using
> inline assembler when PB doesn't do exactly what I want.  All of this
> is professional (programming robotics and CD/DVD palyers) with no limit
> on money spent on hardware or software.  Would you still recomend TASM
> for my situation?
 
--
- Ray Zwitserloot.
 
R.Zwitserloot@antispam.BTInternet.com
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