[ Thanks to Shailendra for this link.
]
“…an in-depth introduction to the Amiga’s revolutionary VP
(virtual processor) assembly code, the heart of the new Amiga’s
Digital Environment. By the end of the article you’ll have a good
understanding of how VP works, not to mention how darn cool it
is!”
“VP code is, in a nutshell, the ideal assemble language. In
fact, it’s such an improvement over traditional non-virtual
assembly language that it needs to be seen and understood in order
to be appreciated. Just to highlight a few of its strong points: it
has an unlimited number of integer and floating-point registers;
you can use high-level looping constructs (similar to those in a
higher-level language like C), rather than using arcane “jnz”
instructions; and it supports register naming and object-based
assembly language programming! As you can see, VP is not your
average assembly language.”
“The demo application that we’re going to look at is extremely
simple. Our sample app opens a transparent window and creates an
interesting alpha-blended shadowy effect (and once you’ve thrown a
few next-gen Amiga boing balls onto the desktop, it looks really
cool). Here’s a screenshot of the “dblend” program running on my
Amiga development system. Thanks to the boing balls, you can see
that this truly is a groovy-looking transparent window…”