4 ms·

Lately, I've been reliving my youth of writing 6502 assembly language, inspired in part by one of Ben Eater's videos[1], and with the aid of Easy 6502[2]. I th

Lately, I've been reliving my youth of writing 6502 assembly language, inspired in part by one of Ben Eater's videos[1], and with the aid of Easy 6502[2]. I think that programming in assembly language is compelling because it is "rightsized" for the human brain. You spend a lot of time solving small, manageable puzzles about the best way to do achieve small victories like trying to squeeze every last cycle or byte out of some small section of code. And then you sit back and laugh because after all that struggle you managed to compute something that would take an insignificant amount of effort to do in a high level language. But it works on this very limited device, and that's a thrill. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl8vPW5hydQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl8vPW5hydQ [2] http://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/ http://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/

davidgould 5y ago
If you want a more modern microcontroller that can actually be used to make things, take a look at the 8 bit STM8 series. They are widely used (you may have a few already, toasters, rice cooker, car etc). They definitely have that 6502 flavor, although even closer to being MC6800 improved, (eg 16 bit index registers), plus a good set of timers, ADCs, UARTs, SPI, I2C etc. Official "Discovery boards" from ST include a programmer and debug connection for under $10, and cheap dev boards are plentiful. Open source C compiler SDCC, and free tools from ST. There is also a very good Forth [0]. Even if Forth is not your thing the site has a lot of good information on STM8. [0] https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef