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The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

research.swtch.com

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Re: The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

#11

Post by sfphotoarts »

amichail wrote: post #5
rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the sensation of working with someone who's incredibly good. And, BTW, the 6502 was a work of art. Simple, elegant and fast (even at 1 MHz), it ran rings around the Z-80's you found in more expensive computers of the time. Plus, it was delightful to program.

Plus, it was delightful to program. Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program. BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.

I found the z80 delightful to work with, especially in comparison with the 6502 because it had twice as many registers and you could switch banks of them on the z80.

you have to love programming to really appreciate assembly, the succinctness, the satisfaction of being so close to the metal, none of this high level peek and poke nonsense of high level languages :)

you don't write code using a hex dump???

You write assembly code using either hand assembly or more efficiently using a tool called an assembler which makes the tedious task of mapping instructions by name to their hex values easier. After a while you get to remember the common ones though, C9 for example.

And I haven't heard of your school buddy, sorry.

Re: The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

#12

Post by amichail »

sfphotoarts wrote: post #11
amichail wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, it was delightful to program. Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program. BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.

I found the z80 delightful to work with, especially in comparison with the 6502 because it had twice as many registers and you could switch banks of them on the z80. you have to love programming to really appreciate assembly, the succinctness, the satisfaction of being so close to the metal, none of this high level peek and poke nonsense of high level languages :) you don't write code using a hex dump??? You write as…

He wrote code with amazing speed using the machine language monitor on the PET -- without an assembler.

Re: The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

#13

Post by Luc »

amichail wrote: post #5
rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the sensation of working with someone who's incredibly good. And, BTW, the 6502 was a work of art. Simple, elegant and fast (even at 1 MHz), it ran rings around the Z-80's you found in more expensive computers of the time. Plus, it was delightful to program.

Plus, it was delightful to program. Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program. BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.

There's a certain delight in getting the most out of such a limited set of instructions and registers, counting the clock-cycles, reducing the bytes used. It's much more fun than assembly on modern processors!

Re: The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

#15

Post by rsc »

amichail wrote: post #5
rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the sensation of working with someone who's incredibly good. And, BTW, the 6502 was a work of art. Simple, elegant and fast (even at 1 MHz), it ran rings around the Z-80's you found in more expensive computers of the time. Plus, it was delightful to program.

Plus, it was delightful to program. Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program. BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.

As Doug McIlroy (inventor of pipes, diff) once said of punched cards, "It's the kind of thing you can be nostalgic about, but it wasn't actually fun."

http://research.swtch.com/2008/04/computing-history-at-bell-...

Re: The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

#16

Post by rsc »

jonsen wrote: post #8
amichail wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, it was delightful to program. Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program. BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.

Studying the manufacturers data sheet for the chip you could in a short time know everything, and I mean everything, about the instruction set. You would never have any doubt about your programming language. That as least was some form of delight.

Watch the video, especially the second half. There's a lot about the 6502 that wasn't apparent from the data sheet.

Re: The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

#17

Post by linker3000 »

amichail wrote: post #12
sfphotoarts wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the z80 delightful to work with, especially in comparison with the 6502 because it had twice as many registers and you could switch banks of them on the z80. you have to love programming to really appreciate assembly, the succinctness, the satisfaction of being so close to the metal, none of this high level peek and poke nonsense of high level languages :) you don't write code using a hex dump??? You write as…

He wrote code with amazing speed using the machine language monitor on the PET -- without an assembler.

Yep, I can remember doing that on a CBM 3016 in secondary school - must have been about 1979. A little later this 'thing' arrived that comprised a keyboard in a large, plain grey case with a micro-cassette drive, permanently hooked up to a domestic TV by a large umbilical cord. A group of us were given some information booklets and told to 'see what we could do with it'. We later found out it was a prototype for the BBC micro and further code updates allowed us to select teletext pages on the TV and go to 'special' pages that downloaded code to the micro-cassette. We wrote a lot of simple games and apps for the beast.

Re: The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

#18

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

rsc wrote: post #15
amichail wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, it was delightful to program. Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program. BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.

As Doug McIlroy (inventor of pipes, diff) once said of punched cards, "It's the kind of thing you can be nostalgic about, but it wasn't actually fun." http://research.swtch.com/2008/04/computing-history-at-bell-...

Punch cards are different: there's substantially delayed gratification.

When you're a poor college student as I was, entering opcodes in a monitor/debugger you wrote in BASIC because you couldn't afford an assembler, then yes, assembly was fun.

Fun, that is, until you had to hand-calculate negative jump offsets. Don't remember why, but for some reason I seem to think that the MC6809 I was running on made it difficult to do so.

Re: The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World

#19

Post by protomyth »

amichail wrote: post #5
rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the sensation of working with someone who's incredibly good. And, BTW, the 6502 was a work of art. Simple, elegant and fast (even at 1 MHz), it ran rings around the Z-80's you found in more expensive computers of the time. Plus, it was delightful to program.

Plus, it was delightful to program. Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program. BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.

I had a lot of fun with the 6502 and I really liked the 6809, so I guess they felt delightful to me. It is a different type of mindset and can really make you focus on the problem at hand. The IBM 370 was a might bit of a pain though.
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