Man of Honour
- Joined
- 31 Jan 2004
- Posts
- 16,338
- Location
- Plymouth
What's copper? 

Oh dear, you may be even older than I am! I did a college project on the Zilog Z80 and the first assembler I wrote was on the 6502 and a hexadecimal LED display only. As for 8085/6 stuff, if the hairs on your arms stand up when I mention the CS and DS registers, then we share a common bondBerserker said:And, as for 68K assembler? Pah. Z80 is where it's at.
And yes, I've done Z80/8080, 8085, 80(1,2,3,4,5)86, 680(0,2,3)0, 6502 in my time (and since forgotten most of it due to disuse). God, does that show how old I am?![]()
man_from_uncle said:Are you any good arty? If so, in what area?
EDIT: I just looked at your profile arty. I don't suppose you're still study are you?
68K ASM is great fun and far more rewarding than any modern high-level language. You'd create your own libraries of code that you could jealously guard and exploit all the various ways of squeezing those few extra machine cycles out of your code. One of the most challenging pursuits for the ASM programmer is to optimise code, espcially if it's someone elses but the effects can be dramatic. For example, you could gain huge performance increases by unrolling complex loops or using repeated additions or bit shifting instead of resorting to using muls and using the moveq to clear a register rather than the slower clr . That sort of thing is mostly redundant these days though and programming is less enjoyable and challenging as a result :/Una said:We still do quite a bit of 68000 asm at Uni, it definatly much easier than reverse engineering programs. Still would hate to write in it for a full time job, guess good asm coders are hard to find these days.
phykell said:C#? C++? All we had in my day was 68000 assembler. I worked as a games programmer many years ago, developing in 68K on the Amiga and when we hit the hardware, we *hit* the hardware, and that means switching off the OS completely. And you try telling that to the young people today, and they don't believe you
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I nearly took a job at Argonaut Software and met Jez San for the interview which was due to me being a bit of a specialist in 3D graphics/realism back then (hitting the hardware of a 24 bit Ikon Pixel Engine). They had some amazing hardware for games development back then including a full 68K simulator. Argonaut had some amazing programmers working for them, so imagine how much I would have learned but I ended up taking a job with an IT Consultancy instead :/Una said:Yeah I wish I had started programming earlier. I started off with java and gradually worked my way downwards (C++/C/68k asm). Its much more rewarding getting things to work as planned. Would have loved to have started games programming on the Amiga. I’m pretty into games dev at the moment and looking at legends like Carmacks work for quake1, you can see some brilliant examples of squeezing every little bit of performance out as possible.