4 ms·

For me, coding in Assembly language during the C64 and Amiga Demo-scene in the 80s is the major reason that I went on to study Computer Science and ended up wor

For me, coding in Assembly language during the C64 and Amiga Demo-scene in the 80s is the major reason that I went on to study Computer Science and ended up working as a system developer for the past 30+ years. One of my fondest memories from my developer experience is writing the first Amiga Demo Creator entirely in Assembly language back in May 1987: https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/05/first-amiga-demo-creator-may-1987.html https://coding-and-computers.blogspot.com/2022/05/first-amig...

trollied 4y ago
Amazing, thank you for sharing
mikepurvis 4y ago
As a teenager I fell into writing a bunch of assembly language for the H8 microcontroller inside the Lego Mindstorms RCX (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS). I guess that was an era when it was much easier to beat the compiler because it yielded about a 10x speedup for the task I needed doing, and was a great learning experience. When I look at modern 64 bit assembly instructions, it looks completely incomprehensible, so I'm glad I got to have that relatively gentle introduction on an 8-bit platform.
xtracto 4y ago
My contact with assembly was during the 90s. I wanted to do cracks and keygens like the ones I saw cool groups like The Phrozen Crew and similar. I learned to use SoftIce, IDA, W32dasm and later OllyDBG to step through assembler code. I started doing simple JZ/JNZ cracks but eventually progressed to reverse engineer keygens and implement them in little C programs. My top crack was with a niche program that was distributed in 3 1/2 diskettes and checked for sectors marked as Bad (B in ScanDisk), if the disk didn't have those bad sectors it failed the copy verification. We had a 1 semester assembler class in my uni. While most of the other students didn't get why were we studying assembler, I was extatic.
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  Nice :) Nothing more adrenaline pumping than pouring over disassembly print outs and cracking tutorials in the middle of the night to make NOP sleds!

trollied 4y ago

Amazing, thank you for sharing

mikepurvis 4y ago

As a teenager I fell into writing a bunch of assembly language for the H8 microcontroller inside the Lego Mindstorms RCX (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS). I guess that was an era when it was much easier to beat the compiler because it yielded about a 10x speedup for the task I needed doing, and was a great learning experience. When I look at modern 64 bit assembly instructions, it looks completely incomprehensible, so I'm glad I got to have that relatively gentle introduction on an 8-bit platform.

xtracto 4y ago

My contact with assembly was during the 90s. I wanted to do cracks and keygens like the ones I saw cool groups like The Phrozen Crew and similar. I learned to use SoftIce, IDA, W32dasm and later OllyDBG to step through assembler code. I started doing simple JZ/JNZ cracks but eventually progressed to reverse engineer keygens and implement them in little C programs. My top crack was with a niche program that was distributed in 3 1/2 diskettes and checked for sectors marked as Bad (B in ScanDisk), if the disk didn't have those bad sectors it failed the copy verification. We had a 1 semester assembler class in my uni. While most of the other students didn't get why were we studying assembler, I was extatic.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Nice :) Nothing more adrenaline pumping than pouring over disassembly print outs and cracking tutorials in the middle of the night to make NOP sleds!