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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

This really takes me back. I loved programming in 65C02 assembly. It was simple but complex enough to understand how computers worked.

Random aside.

One thing I miss is that I never had an assembler for my Apple //e. The small assembly programs I wrote, I had to write using the bare bones mini-assembler that you got by doing

call -151

and then

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6502 was an amazing assembly language. I wrote a VT-100 terminal emulator from scratch in a week or so way back then. Thankfully I had an Apple III with an assembler to build it in. The syntax was so simple to learn, but you could build interesting and sophisticated code by taking advantage of the quirks and tricks in the design. Of course I remember none of it any more. I am still in awe of Woz building the Apple I ROM without any tools at all.

6502 was the first assembly language I learned and still my favorite. Nowadays we see “programmers” who can’t even read assembly, let alone write it :(

Between the 6800, 6809, Z80 and the 6502 I far preferred the 6809, but I did a lot more programming for the 6502 because I got a machine with much better hardware using that chip. After that it was 68K (ST), and then PCs felt like a step down again.

This got me thinking about my time as a teenager teaching myself assembly on my C64 (which of course used the 6502 instruction set). I was trying to recall the assembler I used and I finally dredged it out of my memory: Develop-64 by French Silk Software, a now-forgotten program that I used a lot. My mom ordered it for me (her credit card) and she mentioned that the person on the phone wondered how in the hell some kid in northern Canada had ever heard of them. Good times.

Awesome.

Just did some idle digging out of curiosity, and stumbled on something that may be of interest: http://iancoog.altervista.org/HF/develop64_hf.rar

It was hiding in here: http://comp.sys.cbm.narkive.com/YJAWnSun/develop-64

There are references to a "develop64_cracked" on a retro FTP server that's 404ing for that file; this RAR seems to contain the file was was on the FTP server.

Also, backspacing the file off the path in the first URL gives a listing of some other releases, but this file isn't listed. Woot.

Here are the other tabs that ended up open:

- https://www.google.com/search?q=%22develop-64%22

- [interesting] https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24254 (unfortunately the embedded photos seem definitively dead; I checked IA.)

Interstitial: the forum post above mentions has a link to http://www.radiks.net/~jimbo/art/int7.htm. IA had captures of this just fine, but fiddling around with the dates caused me to stumble on the specific capture http://web.archive.org/web/20110724025913/http://www.radiks...., which contains a "page moved" update pointing to http://web.archive.org/web/20110813050154/http://www.mailsen...; after stripping the IA prefix off that to see if it was still live, it transparently redirected me to...

- [interesting] https://lawlessguy.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/an-interview-wit...

I wish I could use bold for this line - THIS is how you keep data alive, people!! :D

Also for reference, the reocities link in the above URL is dead, but oocities.com works. Unfortunately the geocities paths are not in oocities' archive.

And these links were near the top of Google's results.

- [uninteresting] https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40768

- [uninteresting] http://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.ph...

The only assembly language I ever did was on an MC68HC11 micro-controller (Handyboard). It was so clean and simple.

Still got the book for that board. Friend of mine had a box of the things controlling a set of greenhouses and other sheds. They were the equivalent of the arduino back in the day. Reliable as well.

In high school, we had access to ORC/ASM which was a high level assembler. I spent a long time trying to understand how to program high speed graphics from machine language (Apple II had a painful mechanism for accessing graphics from machine language).

You might be thinking of ORCA/M (which is 'macro' spelled backwards), ORC/ASM would have been a bit too edgy even in those less-corporate days.

There is a lot of NES programming info out there these days and if you haven't had a chance to, it's entertaining to take a look at it - it's a machine with the same CPU but real graphics hardware (for the time). Bitblitting into the mildly non-linear Apple ][ frame buffer will look pleasantly simple. The NES can do an awful lot more, of course.

I was thinking of ORCA/M but I could have sworn it was written as ORC/ASM at some point (I recall my teacher made a joke about it).

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