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Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

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Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#101

Post by mrandish »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #91
mrandish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning assembly is not actually that fun, it's rather painful. It's what you do with it that is fun. As a teen, I taught myself assembler circa 1982 on my Radio Shack Color Computer (with 4k of RAM!). It was indeed painfully challenging, especially due to the complete lack of information available and the fact I didn't know anyone else who knew anything about it. The only reason I persisted was that the BASIC int…

You put it better than I did. I'm younger than you so I had IRC & phpBB to lean on, but that still meant clawing out the advanced knowledge from the hands of the elders. It's where I learned that the best way to get a real answer is to first say something wrong. But at least smart enough to get a response. The feeling of mysticism and challenge is dispersed when put into an easy to grasp format. This enables more peo…

Very well put! Although I didn't know it when banging my teenage head against assembler, throughout my long career in tech I found the combination of tenacity, humility and "down to the metal" sense of how computers work served me very well.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#102

Post by dboreham »

quackduck wrote: post #86
mrandish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning assembly is not actually that fun, it's rather painful. It's what you do with it that is fun. As a teen, I taught myself assembler circa 1982 on my Radio Shack Color Computer (with 4k of RAM!). It was indeed painfully challenging, especially due to the complete lack of information available and the fact I didn't know anyone else who knew anything about it. The only reason I persisted was that the BASIC int…

> I succeeded only because my teenage self somehow pulled off a phone call to Motorola sales where I claimed to be an engineer "evaluating" the 6809 CPU and they sent me the manual and a quick reference card. lol that is such a nice story

Moto and the other large semi vendors back then had data departments that would send you any datasheet on request. My teenage self made many such requests, but in writing in order to not reval my age (in snail mail, everyone's an adult).

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#103

Post by itsmemattchung »

tech_tuna wrote: post #79

Learning assembly has been on my wishlist forever. . . excited to give this repo a look see.

Definitely do it! Working with assembly demystified a lot of questions I had working at higher level languages (like C and Python).

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#104

Post by cptnapalm »

olah_1 wrote: post #80

I think Pico-8 recently added support for editing assembly operations. Also there is a book called Programming from the Ground Up that starts with assembly and moves up to C and beyond.

And it's inexpensive, too! Will be ordering this. Thanks!

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#105

Post by throw34 »

TylerE wrote: post #94
jcims wrote: post #43

There was a coding competition at a local podunk BBS back in ~’91. I figured I would use it as an excuse to learn some assembly. The goal of the challenge i entered was to find all of the prime numbers between one and a million. Of course my goal with the assembly approach was speed and executable size. In both of those I smoked the competition by 3 to 4 orders of magnitude. But the scoring mechanism was heavily weig…

Well, if LoC didn’t count you could just write a gigantic multi-megabyte print statement :)

Or maybe have the object code for the executable as one static constant and jump to it on the one and only line of the program: speed, size and one line of code (maybe two depending on how the counting is done)

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#106

Post by zzo38computer »

They mentioned Z80 but do not have the examples of Z80; maybe in future might be added.

I have used some assembly language stuff, including 6502, Knuth's MIX and MMIX, and virtual codes such as Z-code and Glulx.

I have written small amounts of old x86 assembly code (for the older 16-bit PC), too. (I think that the new x86 is too messy and too complicated, compared with the old x86 which is not bad.)

I have been trying to learn TRON assembly code too, although I cannot find enough information. I found some documents, but they are in Japanese and some important diagrams seem to be missing. There is some English documentation too but it does not explain much.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#107

Post by ddingus »

olddustytrail wrote: post #35
ryanjshaw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I taught myself x86 assembly from a book as a pre-internet teenager. My first .COM printed exactly what it was supposed to on the screen. Then it printed a bunch of random junk and my computer rebooted. This happened every single time I ran the executable. Eventually I actually read the first chapter properly and added MOV AH,4CH / MOV AL,0 / INT 21H. When my executable returned to the DOS prompt this time after runn…

Did you get that "This machine does whatever I can tell it to do!" feeling? And then you wonder what can you think to tell it to do. The wonder of computers.

That is an amazing feeling!

Then it hits: that crash, bug, unexpected behavior is definitely my fault!

Lol, good times when one works on a routine that executes, crashes and burns long before that finger loses contact with the "return" key!

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#108

Post by ddingus »

martin1975 wrote: post #87

"Since forever ago, I've wanted to try writing assembly, even if just to understand why the Rollercoaster Tycoon creator would write 99% of the game in it. To be fair, even after all of this, I still don't understand why they did that." Hubris?

I doubt hubris.

Frankly, depending on their experience, assembly may well be familiar, efficient and effective.

Some people who got going early on in games, in the 8 bit era, went right for assembly language because that is where the speed necessary to make magic happen on the screen was.

Action / arcade games pretty much demanded it, unless they sharply limited what happens on screen.

You might find some of the early stories informative. Nasir, for example, did his first dozen or so games with the mini line assembler in his Apple 2. No source code, no labels, etc...

https://youtu.be/S3EmtTpoEa8

On some of the projects I did on 8 bit computers, it was all about assembly. One planned out a few things, worked around where the screen was, or needed to be (depending on hardware capability), on screen graphics, other data needed, and then build in chunks, saving stuff off to disk.

Every so often, load several in, tie them together, save that off, then run it. It is a different style of thinking for sure.

I bet that developer knew how to build something up that way and went with what worked, was performant, and that was probably the easiest path for them.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#109

Post by khalladay »

weinzierl wrote: post #22
amelius wrote: post #14

Assembly language is actually simple stuff. You just need to read the datasheet. No difficult type systems to deal with. In the old days programming assembly language was nasty because one mistake could mean your computer had to be rebooted and you lost your work. Not anymore.

This is like saying chess is simple stuff because you can learn how the pieces move in five minutes. If all you want is a basic understanding of how things work, that level is ok. If you want to play/program, it is a completely different story. I'd even go so far to say: Why do assembly if your goal is not to be better than the compiler, at least in some respect? Beating the compiler, now tell me that it's simple stu…

Another use case for assembly is reverse engineering, even if you aren't better than the compiler, being able to understand what the compiler spit out is really handy.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#110

Post by NationOfJoe »

kup0 wrote: post #77
jessicard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhhh thank you for mentioning this! This was _really_ important to us, because it was hard for us to find real code examples that worked, and when we did, they were hard to parse. It's also why we put it in GitHub, so it could live alongside the code examples :)

Yes! I think two things with code examples have a significant impact, at least for me personally- 1) the examples are complete and work and 2) line-by-line explanation. A lot of resources show a snippet of code, followed by an impenetrable paragraph that tries to explain multiple concepts from the snippet all at once. Maybe that works for others, but for me it makes it impossible to parse and overwhelms me, so nothin…

This 100%, i often find alot of blogs and documentation really difficult to follow because they just show a snippet and no where in the doc does it cover the prerequisites to get to that point.

I get you don't want to clutter the point, but start with a link to working code or an article that explains the basics.

I would be happy if more articles/docs explained how this code is being called.

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