5 ms·

Plenty of teenagers in the 80s writing games for the various home computers at the time (Apple ][, Atari 400 & 800, Commodore 64).

by spc476 4y ago

jlokier 4y ago
That waa me. My 6502 "IDE" was a BBC Micro, with it's excellent BBC BASIC ROM that had inline 6502 assembler built-in to the BASIC language. It was so good and accessible, and documented in the Advanced User Guide, that after learning BASIC starting age 10, I learned 6502 a few months later and was able to reverse engineer and modify other people's games not long after that. I had the luxury of floppy drives which my contemporaries did not have The floppies helped immensely with self-hosted development of larger programs. Imagine losing all your assembler work due to a crash running it because it was tempting to skip rhe time of several minutes saving to tape. Floppies were reasonably fast for saving before running things, but few people I knew had them. It also gained a Z80 second processor (an add-on; and later a 68000), so rhe Z80 helped with development of 6502 code, as a RAM disk and editing scratchpad that survived 6502 crashes. And for running Wordstar, which was a decent editor. Eventually I had someone else's ZX Spectrum hooked up to the BBC with a kind of home-made bit-banging serial port. That's when things started getting fancy, as my BBC's Z80 second processor's flavour of BBC BASIC could assemble Z80 code for the Spectrum, and run some Z80 binaries from other people's Spectrum software, with the BBC's 6502 providing display and sound emulation.
- deepspace 4y ago
  Yup, that was me too. The BBC Micro was a great 6502 dev environment (for the time). Several years after I moved on from the Beep to a PC, I again had the opportunity to use my knowledge of 6502 assembly. A rally-driving friend asked me to look into changing the fuel curves in their Toyota's ECU. Turns out that many early 90s ECUs used 6502s. I whipped up a 6502 disassembler (in Turbo Pascal) and was able to reverse engineer the ROM dump and make the required adjustments. Fun times.

Plenty of teenagers in the 80s writing games for the various home computers at the time (Apple ][, Atari 400 & 800, Commodore 64).

by spc476 4y ago

Plenty of teenagers in the 80s writing games for the various home computers at the time (Apple ][, Atari 400 & 800, Commodore 64).

jlokier 4y ago

That waa me. My 6502 "IDE" was a BBC Micro, with it's excellent BBC BASIC ROM that had inline 6502 assembler built-in to the BASIC language. It was so good and accessible, and documented in the Advanced User Guide, that after learning BASIC starting age 10, I learned 6502 a few months later and was able to reverse engineer and modify other people's games not long after that. I had the luxury of floppy drives which my contemporaries did not have The floppies helped immensely with self-hosted development of larger programs. Imagine losing all your assembler work due to a crash running it because it was tempting to skip rhe time of several minutes saving to tape. Floppies were reasonably fast for saving before running things, but few people I knew had them. It also gained a Z80 second processor (an add-on; and later a 68000), so rhe Z80 helped with development of 6502 code, as a RAM disk and editing scratchpad that survived 6502 crashes. And for running Wordstar, which was a decent editor. Eventually I had someone else's ZX Spectrum hooked up to the BBC with a kind of home-made bit-banging serial port. That's when things started getting fancy, as my BBC's Z80 second processor's flavour of BBC BASIC could assemble Z80 code for the Spectrum, and run some Z80 binaries from other people's Spectrum software, with the BBC's 6502 providing display and sound emulation.

deepspace 4y ago
Yup, that was me too. The BBC Micro was a great 6502 dev environment (for the time). Several years after I moved on from the Beep to a PC, I again had the opportunity to use my knowledge of 6502 assembly. A rally-driving friend asked me to look into changing the fuel curves in their Toyota's ECU. Turns out that many early 90s ECUs used 6502s. I whipped up a 6502 disassembler (in Turbo Pascal) and was able to reverse engineer the ROM dump and make the required adjustments. Fun times.