Z80GUY's Blog

A blog by Z80GUY in General

Followers 0

entries
8
comments
4
views
5,527

Reading, Reading and more well reading....

Entry posted by Z80GUY June 19, 2009

518 views

Followers 0

Forgot how much went in to the understanding of the 6502, a few years ago a buddy of mine tried to teach me the basics of it on his apple IIe but that was so long ago. That I find the only thing that sticks in my mind from his teachings was he called "counting the count" referring to cycle counting I think.

well I have read the online book "Assembly language for Beginners" at Atari archives online books and Andrew Davies Tutorials are next on my list of reading. I hope to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the inner workings of the 6502(7) Cpu and it's variants but who knows maybe at my age there is no hope at all .

I read somewhere that once you reach my age (39) that the mind does not retain Information as easily as it did when you are a child, so I might not be able to learn it at all like I thought I would.

But who knows I might surprise myself and actually be able to do somthing with what I can retain, it can't hurt to try.

Saturday I am going to continue my work on the 7800 custom Editor / front end to the tools for programming it.

Carl

Followers 0

1 Comment

Recommended Comments

SuperSparky 1

Posted April 11, 2010

I learned Z80 Assembly as my first foray into CPU assembly, and I think it ruined me for the 6502. I was spoiled with the incredible power and ease of programming the Z80 that when I tried to do 6502 I'd get so frustrated. Something I could do in three of for simple commands on a Z80 would take considerably more coding for a 6502 to do. The 6502's limited register set and it's heavy use of page zero as a substitute really frustrated me. I'm sure had I learned 6502 before Z80, my outlook on things would have been different.

The 6502 is certainly an 8 bit "RISC" chip compared to the Z80. What the 6502 has going for it is high efficiency (as do all RISC style processors). Sure it may have take 32 op-codes to do what a Z80 can do in four, but the 6502 did it incredibly fast. A 1.8 MHz 6502 could typically keep up with a 4 MHz Z80 in most cases.

I would like to get back to learning 6502, as I'd like to write my own customer handler code for my own projects, but only time will tell.

Good luck Z80Guy (I like the name, by the way).