Beginning ASM programming

[sanny]

Learn assembly language?

 

I don't know. I can only tell you how I had learned it: Get a book about 6502 assembly language programming, and a pot of tea or coffee as you desire, and just read the book and try to understand everything that's written there.

The book I was using was not that good, but it got me going. (It didn't explain that LDA and friends change the ZF, and I therefore had a hard time to follow the code examples in the book.)

[atarialoha]

Actually this is a really good website

 

https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/

 

You can play around and experiment with the basic instructions, see how they affect the processor flags, etc.

 

You can draw pixels on the screen just by changing the memory locations, designating colors based on the value.

 

After getting a good hang of 6502 assembly language here, you can then read the Atari specific stuff, specific to manipulating the memory locations on the Atari for it to do stuff. Same with C64, etc.

 

You can do the basic lessons on that website first, and then use the simulator with another generic 6502 programming book (I think there are a few by COMPUTE! that were good).

 

Personally I like MAC/65 and to use it on a modern GUI computer (I use Mac), the wonderful ATASM assembler lets you use the same directives as MAC/65. I use the free ATOM text editor for editing programs on any platform Mac/Win/Lin.

[stepho]

Rodney Zaks "Programming the 6502", courtesy of the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/Programming_the_6502_OCR

Zaks "programming the Z80" was my second book for learning assembler back in the day (PDP-11 assembly handbook was the first).

[atarialoha]