| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ PROGRAMMATION ★ D.A.M.S / DAMS / A.D.A.M / ADAM ★ |
| L'ASSEMBLEUR DAMS DE MICRO APPLICATION (CPC Revue) | A.D.A.M (Amstrad Action) | A.D.A.M (CPC Amstrad International) | A.D.A.M (Amstrad Computer User) |
AW manages only a lukewarm welcome for the latest French import. The French influence on the British software market is spreading from games to serious software, it seems. This cross-channel utility is the product of a deal between Audiogenic and French programmers Micro Application. There's something of a glut developing in the assembler market at the moment - an assembler mountain, even - but this one's a bit out of the ordinary. A conventional package loads in two separate sections, assembler/editor and disassembler/monitor, with only one being in the memory at any one time. This means a loading operation every time you want to switch between writing and debugging. With ADAM, however, the separate components all load in one go. You only have to do one load, at the start of a session - from then on, everything you need is in memory. This approach is obviously a boon to disk-less 464 owners, but it does have its problems. To put all the components in memory in one go really cuts down the amount of programming space you have available, in this case to about 28K. If that doesn't sound too bad to you, bear this in mind. To squash the whole system into that amount of memory means cutting down on features - and that's hardly encouraging in a high-price product like this. COMMAND SCREEN In use, the system is rather quirky. The whole thing is run from a main command screen. Single-key commands call up the various different functions of the package. The editor is adequate, but it's very easy to exit accidentally - a double hit on the return key is enough to do this. Also, I could find no way to insert lines above the current top line. You can't leave it blank either; it's easy to enough to leave it as comment or a dummy label, I suppose, but this doesn't speak wonders for the thoroughness of the system. Once you've written a piece of code, you can assemble it by entering the 'a! command on the command screen. Errors are reported as they are found, and will halt assembly immediately. The error messages are helpful, and on entry to the editor you'll find the cursor already on the error line another useful feature. It would have been nice if the system could automatically enter the editor at this point, but you can't have everything. Indeed with this assembler you can't have macros or conditional assembly, so the error handling is pretty advanced! The monitor is the most conventional bit of the package, which is to say that it's not very exciting. Its single step routine can rummage through ROMs if you're feeling nosey, and the slow run facility works well enough. Overall ADAM is pretty disappointing. There's nothing really wrong with it, but it's all been done before, and cheaper at that. If it had come out six months back I'd have suggested buying Devpac and saving yourself a bit of money. As it is, I'd strongly suggest you buy Laser Genius and save yourself £10 or so. You'll get a much better editor, assembler and compiler -even if they don't all fit in memory at once. AA |
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