falter
Veteran Member
In addition to other projects I've been proving out my Altair 8800 by running some programs including some famous ones. I'm decently good at it now but I get confused when the author expects you to enter in your own values for something, particularly memory locations. The listings are often in hex and we have to convert for octal, or they're kind of a mixture.
So for example I was wanting to do the Fool on the Hill demo, and in the comments for the original listing it says 'be sure to load the starting address into H&L at address 002 and 003'. This is the first place I get confused, because looking at the listing itself, it has the address of first data entry at 001 and 002. And then the second point of confusion is, lets say I do as the demo does and start my music data at 041. What *is* 041? Is that octal, or decimal or something else? I guess what I'm asking is, what am I actually putting into 001 and 002 or 002 and 003? This is why i find programming so difficult.
So for example I was wanting to do the Fool on the Hill demo, and in the comments for the original listing it says 'be sure to load the starting address into H&L at address 002 and 003'. This is the first place I get confused, because looking at the listing itself, it has the address of first data entry at 001 and 002. And then the second point of confusion is, lets say I do as the demo does and start my music data at 041. What *is* 041? Is that octal, or decimal or something else? I guess what I'm asking is, what am I actually putting into 001 and 002 or 002 and 003? This is why i find programming so difficult.