6 ms·

What a luxury an assembler was compared to writing programs directly in hex where LDA # was $A9 nn, JMP was $4C aa aa, and RTS was $60 for example. Your brain w

What a luxury an assembler was compared to writing programs directly in hex where LDA # was $A9 nn, JMP was $4C aa aa, and RTS was $60 for example. Your brain would just about as quickly speak hex, though calculating relative branches (limited to a 256 byte range) was a "two pass" mental operation. I still have the green Rodnay Zaks book.

gavinlynch 14y ago
Yah, you learn very quickly how incredibly convenient something as simple as a labeled address can be. Thank god for modern assemblers!
zwieback 14y ago
At first I didn't have an assembler on the Apple ][ so I wrote a horrible Applesoft tool that would calculate jumps and do a little bit of what a real assembler does. Later I used something called BigMac, I think. I didn't understand macros at all, though, until years later.
kragen 14y ago
The funny thing is that an assembler that calculates relative branches for you is a pretty simple program. Why did people spend so much time without writing one?
- OldSchool 14y ago
  I can't speak for everyone but having 1K of total RAM and no cross assembler from which to write that first native assembler were enough to stop me from attempting it :)
  - kragen 14y ago
    Yeah, the RAM limitation in particular requires a lot of creativity; this version would use the entire 1K for its label table: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2012-May/001234.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2012-May... Did you have any external media available, or just the RAM?
    - OldSchool 14y ago
      Unfortunately just RAM, lots of time and the mind of a 12 y/o!
      - kragen 14y ago
        Probably about the best you could do then would be to interactively assemble code (probably without mnemonics!) and output the assembled version. You could probably do a reasonable interactive assembler without mnemonics in 256 bytes; not sure about base64 input and output (four letters/numbers per 3 bytes of code!), or error correction. Did the machine not even have a memory of what was on the screen? Because that's usually at least 2K, and that would go a long way.

gavinlynch 14y ago

Yah, you learn very quickly how incredibly convenient something as simple as a labeled address can be. Thank god for modern assemblers!

zwieback 14y ago

At first I didn't have an assembler on the Apple ][ so I wrote a horrible Applesoft tool that would calculate jumps and do a little bit of what a real assembler does. Later I used something called BigMac, I think. I didn't understand macros at all, though, until years later.

kragen 14y ago

The funny thing is that an assembler that calculates relative branches for you is a pretty simple program. Why did people spend so much time without writing one?

OldSchool 14y ago
I can't speak for everyone but having 1K of total RAM and no cross assembler from which to write that first native assembler were enough to stop me from attempting it :)
- kragen 14y ago
  Yeah, the RAM limitation in particular requires a lot of creativity; this version would use the entire 1K for its label table: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2012-May/001234.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2012-May... Did you have any external media available, or just the RAM?
  - OldSchool 14y ago
    Unfortunately just RAM, lots of time and the mind of a 12 y/o!
    - kragen 14y ago
      Probably about the best you could do then would be to interactively assemble code (probably without mnemonics!) and output the assembled version. You could probably do a reasonable interactive assembler without mnemonics in 256 bytes; not sure about base64 input and output (four letters/numbers per 3 bytes of code!), or error correction. Did the machine not even have a memory of what was on the screen? Because that's usually at least 2K, and that would go a long way.