Assembly Language

Abstract

One advantage of assembly language, and often its main reason for use, is its speed of execution. This is seldom an advantage for sound as the time taken to hear the sound is far longer than the execution speed of a program to make the sound. Also, because of the number of parameters required after a SOUND or ENVELOPE statement, assembly language programming of sound tends to be tedious. Why bother with assembly language then? It can be used to perform tasks that are not possible using BASIC, or it can be useful if memory space is short. Assembly language uses less memory than the equivalent BASIC program. This chapter has been included to show how sound and speech are programmed in assembler and to illustrate some of the things possible using assembly language that cannot be achieved using BASIC.