I picked up the card from eBay, thanks for the idea! On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 8:34 AM, Systems Glitch via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
This was my introduction to 6502 asm:
https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Interfacing-6502- Experiments-Blacksburg/dp/0672216515
I highly recommend it, along with most of the other Blacksburg Group/Bugbook books. Note that you don't need an assembler program for basic learning assembly type routines, *you* get to be the assembler and look up the opcodes in a table. If you need them, I have scans of vintage programming worksheets intended for this purpose.
You might also grab one of these:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/291889128916
I've bought that particular reference card from that seller. I like having reference cards around, I have them for the PDP-11, Intel 8080/8085, MOS 6502, and a few non-CPU references (S-100 bus pinout, et c.). Once you get used to the basic operations offered by most CPUs, and the mnemonics particular to your CPU of choice, a reference card and a sheet of paper will be all you need to write programs.
If you start with C then go to PDP-11 assembly you will understand more some of the choices that they made with the language.
Very true! Many of the bits of pointer magic that confuse people new to C have a direct relationship to hardware operations in the PDP-11 CPU.
The big advantage of learning an assembly language is you will much better understand how a computer actually works than you will get from using high level languages.
That's where I think basic math comes into it -- you will probably be able to fumble your way through the logical operators, but a basic grasp of Boolean algebra will come in handy. You're going to learn to convert between different bases in numbering systems (no, you won't be using negative integers for your higher addresses, like with BASIC :) ).
Assembly/machine language programming isn't all that hard, my first introduction to CISC assembly was the above-linked Blacksburg Group book and a KIM-1. Before that I'd learned PIC16 assembly because the C compiler cost money. I started off with BASIC as well so it can't be 100% true that BASIC ruins programmers :D
Thanks, Jonathan