Contest

[ecube]

I propose the admins here consider a asm competition that addresses various areas. Depending on how you want to do it the winner or winners could win the total $$ people donate for the competition or some other prize(s). I really don't like the asmcommunity forum, spookys hitler like antics are extremely annoying and it's sad people allow themselves to be apart of it. In my opinion masm32 has always been the best asm forum out, but lately the contibutions have been low. People seem to "Grow out of" ASM/MASM programming which is s step in the wrong direction. other programming languages old or new really don't compare to ASM.

[TNick]

Hello, E^cube!

I saw too many people doing things that they didn't enjoy for money (including me). You are suggesting a new way to do this? If someone feels good about programming in ASM, let it have it's pleasure. If not, why forcing him/her? I always thought that, when someone does a think that he likes, he will be far better in that than any other. If we will be 10 that will use ASM, and enjoy it, let us be 10. And, if, some time from now on, no one will want to use it, again, no problem. But ... is this even possible?? We are, by nature, control-freaks. And what better way than ASM to achieve this!? :)

By the way, I understand your good intention... :)

Nick

[Mark Jones]

I've had an idea for awhile now of posting some block of cypher or puzzle and asking members to decode it. But I have no prizes to award the winner. :wink

[Vortex]

E^cube,

What should be exactly the areas for the contest?

[gabor]

Hi!

I too have the feelings that we are having a poor season here. Less posted codes, more homework-smelling questions and much more posts for the non-coding subforums.
E^cube's idea is quite good and could probably give a push to the members towards the original purpose of the board, maybe even without prizes...

ps.: As for myself, I have many open projects published here, but I don't really have much time continue them :( (going to get married, having extra work) I hope to be able to get back in the regular life soon :)

Greets, Gábor

[ecube]

E^cube,

What should be exactly the areas for the contest?

I don't know the exact areas but I can help brainstorm some ideas. I think the areas people should find very useful, interesting, and possibly fun :) string operation and memory procedures seem quite popular looking on the forums, which makes sense as a wide range of programmers can apply them in various things. I definitely think both these areas should be added and broken up into specific sections such as optimize existing procedures, write the fastest, or smallest formatting procedures(wsprintf, replace, etc etc). Other areas i'd love to see are encryption,compression,conversion procedures. Theres been predominatly only 1 masm coder i've seen release various implementations of public encryption algs such as aes,blowish,rc4, etc.. and that's witeg.  I really would love to see this area opened up, even has contest of people writing their own personal encryption algs(regardless if they're secure as that's not a solid reason to deny it). Compression while complicated people submitting their own implementations of again existing algs or their custom ones would be great.  Data conversion procedures like hextobin would be a huge contribution to the asm community, I realize they already exist but they can always be improved upon and new ones added as the current ones seem lacking imo. So here are my ideas so far summarized, as far as rewards go at the very least the winners handles, real name should be posted somewhere as reconition but if we can figure out other prizes that'd be great too..

1)string operations (optimize current ones whether it be speed,size, functionality or create new ones)

2)data formatting
printf like procedure(only seen one in masm that emulates this, be great to have this and other formatting procedure contests)
bin2hex/hex2bin again hex translation procedures exist but functionality, speed and other things could definitely be added

3)encryption/hash/compression(optimize current ones whether it be speed,size, functionality or create new ones)

4)GUI procedures(whether it be for regular applications or for gaming this is a good area)

5)memory operations(this IMO is almost as important as string operations as this can be used as much or more and definitely can be added on to)
array procedures(Donkey wrote some great ones i've personally found extremly useful but can always be improved upon)

6)masm32 find the bugs(not to mock hutch32's work or others but it'd be great for everyone to try hard to find bugs in masm32 to help improve the current verison)

7)vista code(since lots changed as far as security and other things in vista from xp I think it's important we have a contest or something to address the changes and go with them)

8)64bit(lot can be done here, such as upgrade existing 32bit procedures to 64bit)

9)screen animation(the asm compo's the efnet group has held has always been neat screen animations, mostly dos)

10)most complex procedures(complexity definitely has it's place)

anyway that's my ideas for now, i made them pretty broad, and I realize putting this thing together won't be easy but if people contribute we can improve the community a great deal.

[Larry Hammick]

I dunno about this prize idea, but how about a subforum called Kinky Kode? Lots of weird fun things can be done in ASM that would hopeless under the oppressive C regime.

Code Select Expand

szCopy:     ;{dest,source}
    xchg esi,[esp+8]
    xchg edi,[esp+4]
@@: lodsb
    stosb
    or al,al
    jnz @B
    pop eax
    pop edi
    pop esi
    jmp eax

[Vortex]

10)most complex procedures(complexity definitely has it's place)

E^cube, you have nice ideas but writing very complicated procedures for a contest does not make sense. I understand that in some cases complications are unavoidable but efforts to write complicated code should serve good purposes. Let's remember that great ideas in science can be very beautiful because of their simplicity.

[ecube]

10)most complex procedures(complexity definitely has it's place)

E^cube, you have nice ideas but writing very complicated procedures for a contest does not make sense. I understand that in some cases complications are unavoidable but efforts to write complicated code should serve good purposes. Let's remember that great ideas in science can be very beautiful because of their simplicity.

Thanks Vortex, and to address your comments about the complex procedures, the code doesn't necessarly have to be complex to the person who wrote it, but perhaps it is to others. So it can help others learn while at the same time serving a good purpose. An example for myself that would be some complex asm code would have to do with math, doing floating point or whatever the case is to achieve a ultimate goal. The whole idea of this contest, atleast my ultimate goal of it is for people to push themselves, write interesting/fun code and to possibly learn new things. We've all seen what happens when someone posts a procedure of interest and asks to speed test, other contribute their verison,there way of doing it, and while lingo usually almost always wins in terms speed :bg, it's still nice to contribute.

[ramguru]

I think we already have here a contest. Like IDE contest, no big secret that KetilO is wining this one. Like assembler contest (Bogdan, Pelle & Jorgan are participating, who's wining...hard to say). More you contribute, more you're wining :)