3 ms·
I have a question for people reading this article. Where did you get ahold of the relevant docs, back in the 80s? I remember being dimly aware that there was so
by Schiphol 5y ago
I have a question for people reading this article. Where did you get ahold of the relevant docs, back in the 80s? I remember being dimly aware that there was something called 'machine code' which was like BASIC but much faster. But that was it.
- pmontra 5y agoNot the author but I bought a book about assembler for my Sinclair ZX81. I just discovered it's got a Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Z80 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_the_Z80 Edit: wow, see this comment of elvis70 > The author has made his book freely available : http://www.z80.info/zaks.html http://www.z80.info/zaks.html
- Schiphol 5y agoThanks! I might just learn it, 35 years after the fact :)
- elvis70 5y agoPersonally, it was books!
- jacquesm 5y agoLeventhal's CPU series was pretty good, also every manufacturer makes reference manuals for their instruction sets. I still have mine (pretty dog eared, just for sentimental value, unlikely to ever be used again).
- Doctor_Fegg 5y agoThe Sinclair ZX81 manual had the full list of Z80 opcodes in it - Appendix A in http://zxnext.narod.ru/manuals/ZX81_Manual.pdf http://zxnext.narod.ru/manuals/ZX81_Manual.pdf . So with that you could start PEEKing and POKEing and experimenting. I never really did any Z80 coding on the ZX81 itself, but that section of the manual came in really useful when I got an Amstrad CPC, which is what I learned Z80 on. To that I added The Ins & Outs of the Amstrad (https://cpcrulez.fr/book_english-the_ins_and_outs_of_the_amstrad.htm https://cpcrulez.fr/book_english-the_ins_and_outs_of_the_ams...), which documented the firmware and other CPC-specific stuff.
- tyingq 5y agoFor me, mostly from hobbyist magazines that led to BBS dial up numbers that had made copies of software and docs. Though that was tricky, since long distance calls were expensive. So you dealt mostly with whatever a local BBS had, which I assume varied in depth, breadth, quality, etc.
- awwaiid 5y agoIIRC my commodore 64/128 manual came with BASIC and some assembly documentation. Different world when your turn on the machine and ... Get basically a REPL. I did the same thing as the author, wrote BASIC until I needed a faster inner loop (doing some simulation like cellwar or something) and picked up asm to make it (just the inner loop) faster.
- jdswain 5y agoI had an older student at my high school teach a machine language course, complete with a one page table of opcodes and their hex values so that we could type them in. After that I purchased a copy of Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks. Books took 3 months to arrive if they were a special order like that, sometimes longer. To this day it's still one of my favourite books.
- bernds74 5y agoIn Germany we had specialized magazines, and I'm sure there were similar things in most countries. I bought a CPC664 in 1985, and there was a magazine called CPC International. It had articles about all sorts of things - programming languages or documentation for chips like the CRTC. There were also program listings you could type in; I believe I got an assembler that way. Another magazine had a BASIC compiler. Similar things existed later in the Amiga days. There were also books. One of my favourites was an annotated disassembly of the CPC's two major ROMs. 16KB basic operating system, and 16KB BASIC interpreter.
- Renaud 5y agoDepending on where you lived there were some electronic magazines available. I remember dreaming about articles in Elektor and other national magazines like that. Libraries and book stores had a few books, especially if you lived in a university area. Data sheets for the processor and co-processors and digital logic components were usually available in electronic stores (they also had some books). But it's hard to imagine this world now that we have the Internet. I miss the focus needed to hunt down information and understand how thing worked. A lot of it was trial and error, trying to validate your understanding with experimentation.
- pjmlp 5y agoINPUT magazine series, books with programming listing either at the local libraries or some bookstores, local computer club, in Portugal the "A Capital" newspaper informatics section on Friday's issue or the Spooler magazine.