alien.png Other -- Tips & Hints
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Hints
Almost everywhere in CA3 you can get HINTS and TOOLTIPS. These are to help you identify certain objects.. Just by moving the mouse over objects, you'll DIRECTLY see a hint (if available) in the status bar of the main window... Check out figure 53 to see what I mean.

hints&tooltips.png
Figure 53. Hint and tool tip



Hot keys
I can not tell often enough that CA3 has a big amount of hot keys (also known as key combinations). Hot keys are there for you. Most items in the main menu of CA3 have a hot key. That means that those items can be called using the keyboard. e.g. The Project > Compile 'filename' menu item can be called by using the hotkey CTRL+F9... Get used to these key combinations. It is recommended to print out the key combinations section of this chapter...


DB, DW and DS
As TASM wants db, dw and ds as .db, .dw and .fill, adapting sources from other compilers is quite a lot of work. You can of course replace all occurrences of these directives to fit TASM, but then you'll lose the compatibility of MSX compilers. If you define these things then you can use DB, DW and DS in your sources and TASM will auto convert them to .db, .dw and .fill for you:

#DEFINE db .db
#DEFINE dw .dw
#DEFINE ds .fill

The only disadvantage is that the CA3 syntax highlighter will not recognize these defines as .db, .dw and .fill...