Assembly Language

Jon Hylands jon at huv.com
Sat Sep 15 01:55:21 UTC 2007


On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:50:06 -0400, Chris Cunnington
<cunnington at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> So, I'm interested in 6502 assembler, and I just bought Randal Hyde's "The
> Art of Assembly Language" for the 80x86 set. The point of this is that I've
> gotten into a large topic -- computer programming -- and I keep trying to
> see it from different points of view. Assembly seems to me another great,
> bottom up way to learn about this stuff. Being surrounded by people who know
> so much more can be anxiety producing, so I'm climbing the learning curve,
> and I favour the historical approach, thus the interest in old computers,
> Commodore, and such.

I started programming on a Commodore PET, in 6502 assembler. After a year
or two, my parents bought me an Apple //c, which had a 65c02 (extended
instruction set over the 6502). I spent many years writing a lot of 6502
assembler on that computer, and if you look through a pile of COMPUTE or
Nibble magazines, you might find a couple articles with code that I had
published back in the mid-80's.

About 10 years ago, I got a hankering to do this kind of low level
on-the-metal programming, but doing stuff on a 64 or Apple 2 just wasn't
going to cut it. About that time I decided to get into robotics and
embedded programming on 8-bit RISC microcontrollers, which feels a lot like
programming a 6502.

In 1998 I wrote a really simple compiler that translated pseudo-Smalltalk
code into PIC assembler to run on a PIC. The PIC I was using at the time
had 68 bytes of RAM and 1024 words of program FLASH, and I was able to
control a servo, talk to an LCD, and a few other things with PIC/Smalltalk.

http://www.huv.com/uSeeker/smalltalk/pic.html

Anyways, the point being you can still get the same "feel" as programming
on those old systems with nice new 8-bit RISC microcontrollers like the PIC
or the AVR (my current favourite).

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot)
           http://www.huv.com/blog



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