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View Full Version : Tutorial 3 Section 1 : What is Hexadecimal



wraggster
August 26th, 2010, 22:22
Intro
The third DevScene Tutorial starts with a brief intro to what hex codes are and why they are used. After this he looks at how to detect input from the buttons and display simple output messages to the screen, followed by actually painting on the screen and displaying pictures. Finally a discussion on how to draw shapes is outlined.
Another daunting large block to tackle, but hopefully by breaking it into the seven sections shown in the index it will look more achievable.
What is Hexadecimal
This section is an introduction to using registers to control the different subsystems of the NDS. Luckily I already know all about this so it’s a little hard to tell what is a good intro and what is impenetrable technobabble.
I think that introducing registers it may have been more beneficial to think about them as banks of switches hidden away in the computer subsystem that we can turn on and off by writing numbers to them, and then building up to binary numbers from there. Here we can talk about adding and subtracting binary numbers and a quick sidebar to hexadecimal notation.
Returning to discuss boolean operations NOT, AND, OR & XOR and finally talking about rotations and shifts. After this talking about the C implementation of these operations and finally returning to the syntax of the C declarations using volatile, const and preprocessor macros.
Location
http://www.dev-scene.com/index.php?title=NDS/Tutorials_Day_3&oldid=7522
Resource Links
Title NASA – What is the “secret code” used by the Voyager spacecraft?
Subjects Binary Numbers, Hexadecimal Numbers
Ages Elementary School
Location http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/vgr_fact1.shtml
Title Computer Science Unplugged – Binary Numbers
Subjects Binary Numbers
Ages Elementary School
Location http://csunplugged.org/binary-numbers
Title Williamson Labs – Boolean Logic
Subjects Boolean Operators
Ages Middle School
Location http://williamson-labs.com/480_logic.htm
Notes Ugly 90s style site, but the animations to illustrate concepts are nice
Title Venn Diagrams for Boolean Logic
Subjects Boolean Operators
Ages High School
Location http://www.mountsaintvincent.edu/library2/venn.htm
Notes Venn Diagrams illustrating boolean operators as used in internet searches
Summary
As this tutorial is again quite long, I’m going to make several small posts rather than getting waylaid with a long meandering piece . I think that libnds has changed since the author first wrote the tutorial, and perhaps the hexadecimal theory is no longer as critical as the time of original writing. It will still be required to understand registers, but could be ‘masked’ (bad pun) by a macro till later.

http://aussieinca.drunkencoders.com/2010/08/25/tutorial-3-section-1-what-is-hexadecimal/