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On 16/01/12 19:02, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Mon, 16 Jan 2012, Rob Beard wrote:On 16/01/12 11:53, Gordon Henderson wrote:Gone are the days of knowing an Apple II or BBC Micro in & out - knowing what ever peek/poke meant. Is that a good or bad thing? I'm not sure. Who knows. GordonNot sure, maybe it's a bad thing? I'm looking to get an old C64 and learn assembler on it, no real reason, just something to do as I've always been curious about it. :-)There's a lot on ebay... I never was a commodore fan myself though, always Apple, bbc... What I'd probably do is get am emulator though... I did a lot of 6502 assembler once upon a time, but I had a "proper" assembler which ran on the Apple II which I could then use to program eeproms to go into some custom built control boards I'd designed.
I did download Vice and have a play, and I managed to get hold of a disk image for Turbo Assembler, I've so far managed to make the border flash :-)
Considering the nearest I got to this when I had an Amstrad CPC was poking random memory addresses and making funny things appear on the screen I was quite impressed with myself :-)
I have been scouring ebay for some old computer hardware recently for another project - make sure you get a machine in working order with a disk drive of some sorts though - but some of the old machines do go for quite a premium - especially in working order. I just missed an auction of 3 x non-working BBC units & monitors which was collect-only in Brixham - £15 it went for and I'd not set a reminder to check before the auction ended.. I was convinced I could make at least one of them work though!
An old school friend has offered me his old C64, I did see the BBC machines on eBay but without transport until later this week I figured it was probably a bit of hassle getting them so I didn't bid :-)
Having looked into the C64 a bit I did find a bit of hardware which plugs into a parallel port and with a Linux utility you can emulate a disk drive although it's not as fun as the real thing :-)
I've also seen someone selling flash adaptors for the Beeb, think they were Compact Flash adaptors.
An old Sinclair Mk14 went for $3000 recently too.. I have one in working order, maybe not quite as pristine as the one on ebay, however...
Nice, I wish I'd kept my ZX81, but I guess they're probably a little more common.
There are also a lot of BBC micros on ebay - they have a built-in assembler disguised as part of the BBC Basic - it's quite effective, and the cassette interface was reasonable if you don't get one with disks...
Ahh okay that's interesting to know. I'll keep an eye out for a BBC too. Again I've just been playing around with it on an emulator.
And the 6502 wasn't a bad little chip either. I never did get into any of the Z80 based systems, despite working on an 8080 industrial controller for a year (in assembler) and owning an actual CP/M machine!
I figured something like the 6502 would probably be well documented these days and I'm sure I can probably find a book on it. I want to learn something simple so I thought 8-Bits would be a good start :-)
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq