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OffTopic > Machine Code is for Kids!

#176199 - keldon - Fri May 06, 2011 4:46 pm

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-03-30-machine-code-is-for-kids-article

I've been saying this for a long time, so much simpler to learn.

#176200 - Quirky - Fri May 06, 2011 5:16 pm

Seems like this is the original, saves logging in: http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/03/24/machine-code-is-for-kids/ By Dylan Cuthbert no less (Star Glider, Star Fox, etc).

I remember that I didn't really grok C and pointers until after I'd understood assembly. It just all clicked into place. Assembly is fiddly and you need to write tons of it to do anything, but it has a definite simplicity - at least as he points out in the post for Z80, 6502, ARM. Not x86!

One problem for kids is: where would you start with assembly nowadays? If you do GBA coding in ARM then I suppose you could use an emulator, but there's still a lot of concepts to learn: compiling, linking, emulators, etc, etc. Something like Python would let you get something on screen quicker - `print "Hello"` is enough to get started.

#176210 - sonny_jim - Wed May 11, 2011 12:18 pm

The really, really great thing about the BBC model B (which I'm sure Dylan would of used at one point in his life) is that you could write your program out in pure BBC BASIC (and a good BASIC it was too) and then drop straight into ASM right in the middle. It meant that you could knock up something quickly in BASIC and then go through and optimise the intensive parts in ASM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC

I stopped working on DSLinux a long time ago but that article came in handy for the project I am working on at the moment (custom software for mid-90's pinball tables), where I only get a 6809, 512K ROM and 64K of RAM to play with:
http://www.oddchange.com/freewpc/

Good article, thanks for linking.
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