68k Assembly

Who here has done any 68k assembly?

I got a copy of Devpac 2, and the Abacus book 'Amiga Machine Language' a couple of years ago. I did the first few pages but didn't really make much progress, then gave up.

Fortunately, on the HND course which I am doing now, we are going to be doing some 68000 assembly.

I guess I'll get my book out and get a head start.

I gave it a try many years ago. First on the Atari ST, and later on the Amiga. It is pretty heavy going and always seemed very long winded to get anything done. I had a couple of decent books on the ST. One focusing on 3D graphics. Got a few things to work, but it was over complex for what I wanted to do. I really only took a look to explore it a bit and see what it was all about. Never really interested me enough to get me hooked. I think with programming languages you either enjoy and fall in love with them early on, or you find them hard work and give up.

At the time I instead got interested in STOS on the ST, and then AMOS on the Amiga. I also gave HiSoft Basic a try, as well as Helm (which was a multimedia interactive environment like an early version of Macromedia Director).

I also gave C and C++ a try a few years ago, but again found it a bit too heavy going. Was interesting though and definitely thought it more useful than Assembler. Could see the usefulness in learning it these days as C can be used to code pretty much anything on any platform. Are you being taught C on your course at all?

For me, high level languages have been of more interest. The one that first really grabbed me was Lingo within Macromedia Director. I loved that language. And Actionscript in Flash was a very similar experience, and now overtaken and more powerful than Lingo. And I also was really drawn in by PHP. I hate all other server-side languages for web development, but love PHP.

C is not too bad...I also did some assembly...so long winded! Very annoying and not worth it :/

I doubt we will be doing any C, as this is an electronics course. I think C comes more under 'computing'. There are lots of books on it in the library though.

Don't let 68k assembly scare you off. It's not so difficult as it seems in the beginning.

Trust me, I had the same feelings when I started to learning 68k assembly, but when you'll understand how the system and memory works, it will be much easier for you; and yes, that Abacus book helped me a lot for a start.

I'm not scared. I find the hardware easy enough to understand. I just didn't do much when I got the book a couple of years ago because I was concentrating on learning BASIC for a project.

We've started using assembly now.

We have some brand new microcomputers, which have a 68000 running at 8MHz. It has a small amount of memory, an OS (monitor) in ROM and the usual PIT and DUART. Its called TIM and is made by LJCreate. You can write the programmes on a Windows PC and send them down a serial cable, then the PC just acts as a terminal. Its a nice system.

TBH assembly isn't as hard as it looks. It just takes a bit of getting used to, especially since I am coming from BASIC.