6502 Assembly Nostalgia

That's what 6502 assembly was for!

I'm guessing you didn't program a 6502-based computer in assembler in the 80's?

Someone please ELI5. I was no savant at 13 years old. But I remember being able to trace through 65C02 code and figure out enough of it to hack around and fix Software Automated Mouth to work in 80 column mode. When you redirected output from SAM to the screen it would revert to 40 column mode.Later on, I ported it to work with ProDOS.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft

Heck yes, I know.I've programmed in it myself, on both the Commodore 64 and the BBC Micro. I liked that instruction set. Those were the days of 8- and 16-bit computers with slow speed and low RAM (compared to today), when people used all kinds of clever tricks to save a byte here or a clock cycle there. Good fun.

Wow, what memories, the very first line of assembler code I ever wrote was on a C64. Had one for years! Now it's going to be super hard to get another one.

I started with BASIC on a Vic 20 in 1979 in a computer class for kids. Then I got my own Atari 400 at home, so I learned BASIC on that. Then around 1984 I got a Commodore 64 and it was amazing. I quickly got past the BASIC part of the C64 manual and in the back of the manual they had a memory map, all the hardware registers for all the chips, and then all the 6502/6510 opcodes. There was even an entire schematic for the C64 in the back of the book as a fold-out poster. 14 year old me was ho

Reminds me of doing the same on a Commodore 64 with its 6502 processor in the mid-1980s. Typed in the program from a magazine. I don't remember if inner loop was in Basic or assembly language. Had to leave it running overnight to see a 160x200 image with 4 colors the next morning. I was surprised that this worked at all.

For me, it was a TRS-80 clone, a System-80, sold in Australia. I discovered assembly language and desperately wanted a C compiler. I bought the source code for an assembler from somebody, wrote an interpreter for the 8080 mnemonics using a Unisys 1100 mainframe and got the assembler running after bootstrapping it to recognise Z-80 mnemonics. Then I acquired the source code for the small-C compiler[0] and rewrote that in Pascal and modified to to produce Z-80 assembler mnemonics. Using the c

I learned CHIP-8 asm and Gameboy asm before ever touching C

My first real job was programming a Commodore PET for a merchant - in BASIC. When I needed searches to be faster I wrote a routine in 6502 assembler. Unfortunately I didn't have an assembler, so I hand-assembled my code using the instruction code chart from the back of a book. My "loader" was a chunk of BASIC code POKEing numbers into memory.Can confirm that the 6502 instruction set is pleasantly simple. On the other hand, a similar experience can be had on some modern CPUs as