💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1137 captured on 2023-01-29 at 04:39:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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So, I saw a thing on the YT channel "The 8-bit Guy" some time ago about Assembly Language, and I think the video before that was "The Basics of BASIC", and over a couple months, I kept going back and thinking again and again about AL.
"Wow!", I thought. "It would be like writing code **straight** to the damn hardware, itself!" Which, is kinda IS doing that.
So I started to put together some notes from a Github hosted "e-book" called "Some Assembly Required" by the "Hack Club" (an "organization" of developers/programmers who are in high school - sort of a national organization type of a thing), and I am a fair bit into SAR, and got down to the some specific code examples (which were geared for x86 (64-bit)), and I was like "this (AL) is essentially all math-based, yea?", and I kinda steered away from AL after that.
The initial intention was to figure out a thing or two about a thing or two and try to write *something* with RISC-V, as it is supposed to be the most approachable over other types of AL.
Either way, I stepped away from the diligent note-taking, for now, but will go back to it soon enough.
In the meantime, I need to start getting some stuff together for the "retro" computer project I am putting together, which is KIND OF retro, but really it will be a kit of some kind, using a modern board (micro computer), but one that is geared for retro computing. Essentially, not a "legit" old Commodore 64, or Tandy, or anything like that, but just a modern-component board that is sort of low-powered (and therefore affordable). I am aiming for one of the Maximite models (either the original (which is hard to find these days), or the newest version of it - the Color Maximite 2 Deluxe).
Anyhow, I hope all are well, and I'll simply have a water please, ~bartender, as I have plenty of caffeine in me already ;)
I once dove into the assembly space with a MIPS processor, and took great joy in talking directly to the CPU.... that was until I learned that assembly itself is not a machine language but an *interpreted* one, because newer CPUs now perform their own optimisations in the hardware space!
After that I grew listless and world weary, and I closed the curtains in the basement and listened to depressing 80s music.
I marvel at your patience and gusto.
How about a Commander X16 or MSX3? The MEGA65 is too expensive.