31–38 of 38 posts
I have been continuously hacking on my first computer, received in a delicate cross-Nullabor operation in 1983, the lovely little Oric-1. It’s a 6502 ‘also-ran’ victim of the 80’s 8-bit computing war, but is still .. fascinatingly .. actively hosting new software, even today. The retro scene is alive and well, and in many small ways, flourishing. Even the obscure platforms get new device peripherals designed for them…
Where would you suggest someone starts if they want to get into this stuff? Start writing an emulator? Which one would you recommend?
I want to like it but my brain is too feeble for it. I will wait for when efficiency (as well as speed) comes from elegance in the programming language itself rather than the human mind having to cater to some fundamental archaic syntax.
That's a self-defeating attitude which you don't want to reinforce :-(
Assembly is not difficult but writing large-scale programs/systems in it is. But almost nobody does this nowadays; it is generally C & Assembly. So you need to know/understand just enough assembly to get along.
Start with Jonathan Bartlett's Programming from the Ground Up for a nice introduction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702025 Then look at Daniel Kusswurm's and Larry Pyeatt's books. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45782206
This article is less about assembly programming and more a tour de force on retro game development for the Atari ST. The author talks about using inline assembler to optimize gfx and game rendering inner loops. Oh and the author ported Doom to the Atari ST. Some people are drawn to assembly and that’s great. Me personally, after a course in undergrad studying MIPS assembly, I learned to appreciate what all the compil…
While I have manually written code for Z80, 68000, x86, and MIPS, I never bothered with MIPS outside university project assignments.
Ben Eater delves into 6502 assembly with regard to his bread-board 6502 computer. I recommend anyone interested in assembly do a search (on YouTube) for his series. I got one of his kits and assembled it while working through his YouTube series. (I didn't, at the time, continue very far into the assembly course, but perhaps will this Winter when I am hunkered down in the Midwaste with the blizzards beating down on my…
This article is less about assembly programming and more a tour de force on retro game development for the Atari ST. The author talks about using inline assembler to optimize gfx and game rendering inner loops. Oh and the author ported Doom to the Atari ST. Some people are drawn to assembly and that’s great. Me personally, after a course in undergrad studying MIPS assembly, I learned to appreciate what all the compil…
Where would you suggest someone starts if they want to get into this stuff? Start writing an emulator? Which one would you recommend?
Honestly, Assembly is great. It's the most closer-to-the-metal, no-nonsense, raw experience you can get. The problem is that means it's also tedious and error-prone to write, but the elegant simplicity of the abstraction is still there.