3 ms·
35 years ago I had to program a Z80 by "assembling" programs by hand and punching hexcodes into a board. This was made easier by writing an assembler for it. Th
by groos 3mo ago
35 years ago I had to program a Z80 by "assembling" programs by hand and punching hexcodes into a board. This was made easier by writing an assembler for it. This was my way into tools which took me eventually to working on a major C++ compiler.
- asdefghyk 3mo agoRE "....assembling programs by hand and punching hexcodes into a board......" You translated you assembly language to machine language. ( Machine language is the only language a CPU can understand. )
- rahimnathwani 3mo agoYes 'assembling' is exactly what GP did when they converted e.g. `LD A, B` into 0x78. I wouldn't call it a 'translation'. It's encoding. (We don't think of converting between ASCII codes and symbols as translation.)
- ColdStream 3mo agoYeah but that would have been the late 70's... oh my gosh that was 1991! It was cool to do that kind of stuff, you knew exactly what your program was doing (if all went right) at all times, but it sure was a slog to get anything complex moving.
- adrian_b 3mo agoDuring the eighties, there were a lot of people, including myself, who could read directly the hex codes of the Z80 instructions as easily as its symbolic assembly language. That was very handy for reverse engineering programs like the Microsoft CP/M BASIC interpreter or FORTRAN compiler.