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6502 Assembly Language Programming
288 pages, Paperback
First published March 23, 1983
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March 13, 2024
Picture, if you will, an overly-ambitious fifth grader tired of the limitations of Atari 800 Basic Programming to create that awesome game he has in his head. After all, he's a _programming expert_! How hard can it be to do it all in assembly? (Spoiler: Lots. Lots hard.)
He then goes and asks for the Atari 800 assembly programming package for Christmas and has the single worst Christmas vacation, at least until measured against a year in early college when he had four impacted wisdom teeth extracted and ate Christmas dinner through a straw.
Somewhere after that 5th grade Christmas and the year that the Atari was unceremoniously replaced with a neato beige IBM-AT clone (80286 POWER!), he got himself the _6502 Assembly Language Programming_ book to try and make sense of things: the assembler software documentation only told you how to use the assembler program, not how to program the 6502 processor or the details of the Atari 800 hardware and software/hardware interface.
This is, in short, the oldest book in my collection that I had purchased new for myself and hadn't read all the way through. Still tucked inside: the original Atari SY6500 Instruction Set Summary quick reference card punched out of its three ring binder.
The assembler was distributed on a cartridge, by the way. The hefty metal ones with the retractable protective gadget.
I figured I owed it to myself to finally do something about this. During this year where every tech-bro CEO going on about how AI and AI-devoted GPU silicon will change our world. Which, every time I hear it, the words "Butlerian Jihad" wanders across my forebrain, trying to find something to attach to. Might as well get on that retro wagon before the rush. Definitely no thinking machines down here in 8 bit land.
So, what do I think now, after 30 years in the industry and two machine language architectures and six-to-eight high level programming languages? Including kernel programming in two OSes?
It is sort of interesting traveling through this, half thinking about what I'm learning now and what I did learn or should have learned back then. It was clearly useless for an impatient eleven year old who JUST WANTS TO MAKE IT DO THE THINGS but contains a lot of SHUT UP AND LEARN YOU STUPID KID.
The whole experience is hampered by this being a textbook or workbook, not a reference manual. Factual information is sometimes squirrelled away in the various exercises, and even mumblety-decade me looked askance at the longhand math problems in hexadecimal and binary. Which, the second I saw them again, made me say "oh yeah this is where I stopped".
I didn't do any of the exercises then. Didn't do them now, either. Some, especially the later "how would you do this" ones, would be absolutely essential to become versed in actually using the thing.
But for the most part it's hard to separate criticisms of the book and its presentation from criticisms about the 6502 itself. Its designers certainly made some interesting decisions probably revolving around costs that both guaranteed its success through the early 80s and contributed to its demise at the hands of Intel's 8088.
It is, in short, sort of charming and I can see why there is still a community of enthusiasts working with it, and is an architecture that rewards careful design, clever implementation, and a spell grimoire of really dirty programming tricks that Fernandez and Co didn't share or didn't know.
He then goes and asks for the Atari 800 assembly programming package for Christmas and has the single worst Christmas vacation, at least until measured against a year in early college when he had four impacted wisdom teeth extracted and ate Christmas dinner through a straw.
Somewhere after that 5th grade Christmas and the year that the Atari was unceremoniously replaced with a neato beige IBM-AT clone (80286 POWER!), he got himself the _6502 Assembly Language Programming_ book to try and make sense of things: the assembler software documentation only told you how to use the assembler program, not how to program the 6502 processor or the details of the Atari 800 hardware and software/hardware interface.
This is, in short, the oldest book in my collection that I had purchased new for myself and hadn't read all the way through. Still tucked inside: the original Atari SY6500 Instruction Set Summary quick reference card punched out of its three ring binder.
The assembler was distributed on a cartridge, by the way. The hefty metal ones with the retractable protective gadget.
I figured I owed it to myself to finally do something about this. During this year where every tech-bro CEO going on about how AI and AI-devoted GPU silicon will change our world. Which, every time I hear it, the words "Butlerian Jihad" wanders across my forebrain, trying to find something to attach to. Might as well get on that retro wagon before the rush. Definitely no thinking machines down here in 8 bit land.
So, what do I think now, after 30 years in the industry and two machine language architectures and six-to-eight high level programming languages? Including kernel programming in two OSes?
It is sort of interesting traveling through this, half thinking about what I'm learning now and what I did learn or should have learned back then. It was clearly useless for an impatient eleven year old who JUST WANTS TO MAKE IT DO THE THINGS but contains a lot of SHUT UP AND LEARN YOU STUPID KID.
The whole experience is hampered by this being a textbook or workbook, not a reference manual. Factual information is sometimes squirrelled away in the various exercises, and even mumblety-decade me looked askance at the longhand math problems in hexadecimal and binary. Which, the second I saw them again, made me say "oh yeah this is where I stopped".
I didn't do any of the exercises then. Didn't do them now, either. Some, especially the later "how would you do this" ones, would be absolutely essential to become versed in actually using the thing.
But for the most part it's hard to separate criticisms of the book and its presentation from criticisms about the 6502 itself. Its designers certainly made some interesting decisions probably revolving around costs that both guaranteed its success through the early 80s and contributed to its demise at the hands of Intel's 8088.
It is, in short, sort of charming and I can see why there is still a community of enthusiasts working with it, and is an architecture that rewards careful design, clever implementation, and a spell grimoire of really dirty programming tricks that Fernandez and Co didn't share or didn't know.
Displaying 1 of 1 review