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Wow, programming in Assembly is so much easier now than it was then. Imagine the luxury of having source files that you could modify in a text editor. Joy. I

Wow, programming in Assembly is so much easier now than it was then. Imagine the luxury of having source files that you could modify in a text editor. Joy. I remember my first LDA's on the Commodore 64, directly in the console, having to assign a memory location to each and every line as you went along, and woe unto you if you didn't NOP yourself out enough extra space from time to time to be able to insert code (or at least JMPs) as you added features. I'm not complaining, mind you. At least we had 3 letter codes we could use for instructions instead of having to memorize hex codes for everything. But yeah, even a simple assembler that handled the line numbers for you would have made me the happiest 13 year old around.

boomlinde 13y ago
Proper macro assemblers (covering at least the functionality used in this source code) have been available for the C64 since 1982, so it wasn't necessarily as hard as punching the instructions straight into RAM with a monitor cartridge.
chesterbr 13y ago
I get your point, but I must say that the Apple II had LISA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazer%27s_Interactive_Symbolic_Assembler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazer%27s_Interactive_Symbolic_...), which wasn't half bad for the machine - guess I was a luckier 13 year old, because I happened to have stumbled upon a copy :-) Also, developers who had a bit more of resources (e.g., minicomputers) even used them to emulate 8-bit systems (unlikely to have been done for the Atari, due to the complexity of TIA, but a textbook case is how Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed the Altair Basic using Allen's 8080 emulator for the PDP-10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC).