Re:The 6502 microprocessor is 35 years old as of September 16th
by limmeau on Friday September 17, 2010 @10:35AM
(#1701269)
So you taught yourself 6502 assembly language while there were already internet cafes? When was that?
Re:The 6502 microprocessor is 35 years old as of September 16th
by mahmud on Friday September 17, 2010 @06:06PM
(#1702992)
1996
Re:The 6502 microprocessor is 35 years old as of September 16th
by zandorg on Friday September 17, 2010 @10:17AM
(#1701190)
Not quite on topic, but as for PC speaker tricks: I once found if you control the tape-interface relay switch on a BBC B (or BBC Electron), from a BASIC loop, you can make it click really fast and make silly noises! Doesn't work in an emulator though.
It had a few worked examples. I used to cover the examples with a sheet, read the problem, then try to solve them before looking at the answer (since I didn't have a physical machine to test things.) -- I quickly came to appreciate that there was no canonical single "answer" in algorithms, and the only way to compare the "equality" of two solutions is see they leave the machine in the same state, given identical initial configurations .. very disturbing thoughts for a self-taught newbie programmer.
I did that for a few weeks and was bored. Then got Robert Lafore's book "Assembly Language Programming for the IBM PC and XT", and I killed it. Hard to explain this, but my first working assembly programs were quite advanced, because I have been "paper hacking" for quite some time by then. I wrote my first apps off of a floppy disk that I used to insert into internet cafe or library computers, when no one was looking (I didn't do any of the PC speaker tricks until much later, when I got my own computer.)