3 ms·

I'm always shocked when I run into people who use an assembler instead of interacting directly with their target hardware. If you're dedicated to your craft, y

by smoyer 11y ago

I'm always shocked when I run into people who use an assembler instead of interacting directly with their target hardware. If you're dedicated to your craft, you memorize the associated byte-code and enter that directly into the computer's memory. With practice, the machine will crash with less than 50% of your changes. On a more serious note, the first computer I ever touched had six thumbwheels that were used to enter a memory address (4) and the associated byte to be placed at that location (2). The first computer I ever built/owned was a COSMAC ELF [1]. It (originally) had 8 toggle switches that could be used to enter the address and data (serially). In both cases, you still wrote assembly (on paper) and used a translation table to look up the associated byte-codes which you transcribed to the paper. Finally you actually entered it via the system's input. [1] http://www.cosmacelf.com/ http://www.cosmacelf.com/

amelius 11y ago
Why even rely on the machine instruction decoder implemented in your microprocessor? I prefer to hook up ALUs and flipflops manually...
- 50CNT 11y ago
  That's a lot of work though, I just let the verilog compiler handle that.
marssaxman 11y ago
There was a span of a year or two when I could literally write 68000 machine code by hand, without needing an assembler, due to an obsession with sprite blitters culminating in a bit of code which would generate arbitrary custom blitmask functions as part of the image-loading process. I had very little understanding of "abstraction" at the time, so it pretty much just built instructions from the bits up via shift and mask operations. I would never do anything like that now[1] - but I'll always be proud of the day I dropped into Macsbug, picked out a section of memory, wrote myself a minimal Tetris implementation, moved the PC (aka IP register) into it, and played. It crashed, of course, but the fact that it even sort of worked felt pretty good. 1 - possibly not strictly true in the literal sense as I still have a soft spot for these sorts of hacks

by smoyer 11y ago

amelius 11y ago

Why even rely on the machine instruction decoder implemented in your microprocessor? I prefer to hook up ALUs and flipflops manually...

50CNT 11y ago
That's a lot of work though, I just let the verilog compiler handle that.

marssaxman 11y ago

There was a span of a year or two when I could literally write 68000 machine code by hand, without needing an assembler, due to an obsession with sprite blitters culminating in a bit of code which would generate arbitrary custom blitmask functions as part of the image-loading process. I had very little understanding of "abstraction" at the time, so it pretty much just built instructions from the bits up via shift and mask operations. I would never do anything like that now[1] - but I'll always be proud of the day I dropped into Macsbug, picked out a section of memory, wrote myself a minimal Tetris implementation, moved the PC (aka IP register) into it, and played. It crashed, of course, but the fact that it even sort of worked felt pretty good. 1 - possibly not strictly true in the literal sense as I still have a soft spot for these sorts of hacks