I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

Re:I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64 by commandlinefan on Friday July 17, 2026 @10:18AM (#48947685)

I hit the limits of C64 basic pretty quick and I read somewhere that there was a different language called "assembler" that was faster, so I convinced my mom to buy me a book about it. As I started reading the book I realized that I needed some software to go with it (the actual assembler...) and the book was about the "Merlin64 assembler" so I begged my parents to buy me that software for Christmas.

Well, as it turns out, that particular assembler was actually pretty obscure software. My poor Dad had to visit a dozen computer stores in Ann Arbor before he _finally_ found a copy.

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Re:I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64 by tverbeure on Friday July 17, 2026 @12:07PM (#48948986)

I started my C64 assembler adventures by manually converting opcodes to hex. Got tired of that real quick. I never had a real assembler, but DISMON was a pretty decent interactive disassembler that even supported code relocation.

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Re:I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64 by mark_something on Friday July 17, 2026 @11:36AM (#48948655)

I was more lucky, I bought a book about C64 assembler in a second hand book store with my pocket money (must have been in 1989 or 1990).

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Re:I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64 by commandlinefan on Friday July 17, 2026 @11:44AM (#48948731)

I remember spending hours typing in hex dumps from the back of Compute!s Gazette back then. To this day, I still remember that LDA at A9 and STA was 8D.

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Re:I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64 by tverbeure on Friday July 17, 2026 @12:04PM (#48948958)

I’ll never forget 53280 and 53281.

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