I started out on an IBM 360 assembler out of school. The 360 used stone knives and bear skins. I picked up Mac80 (as they called it back then) from the Intel manuals. Now I find myself digging through X86, PPC and Sparc in dumps quite often. Don't know how anyone can debug code without knowing a little assembly. I found that reading the assembly that comes out of the compiler is a good starting point, along with a machine code reference manual.<br> <br> Might I suggest downloading the Atmel IDE and compiler. Atmel chips run everything from 8 pin ICs to 64 pin with Mbs of flash, eeprom and RAM memory. The IDE has a fairly nice emulator that lets you watch as instructions are run. Gives you a nice feel for using registers, stacks, and mapped IO. The IDE is much like the VisualC++ 6.0 IDE and there are Linux versions as well. Even runs gcc.<br><br><b><i>Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org></i></b> wrote:<blockquote
class="replbq" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"> <br><br>On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, gramlich wrote:<br><br>> Well, I am interested in learning assembly to understand the computer, I<br>> was just thinking that x86 would be the way to go since it's the type of<br>> machine I own.<br><br>The problem with the x86 is all the legacy crap. Not to mention quite a <br>few flat out bad designs, plus a whole boatload of unnecessary complexity <br>no one uses- now or ever.<br><br>><br>> How successful would I be trying to get a ppc processor emulated in<br>> Qemu? I've used it for testing out other distros, but it seems a bit<br>> unstable even when the emulated machine is an x86.<br><br>Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think 68K would be a <br>better first assembler. There are quite a few 68K assemblers kicking <br>about. EASy68k looks nice, but it's
windows-only:<br>http://www.monroeccc.edu/ckelly/EASy68K.htm<br><br>One other thing I'd consider is finding an old PPC or 68K Mac to play on- <br>one can probably be had for cheap if not free. This list is a good place <br>to ask.<br><br>><br>> What's your advice? Also, what is this high level assembly I keep<br>> reading about. Is it pseudo code for teaching purposes or is it<br>> legitimate?<br><br>It's called "C", and I recommend learning it after learning assembly <br>language. C makes a heck of a lot more sense if you know what's going on <br>at the assembler level (*any* assembler)- for example, the pointer/array <br>confusion makes perfect sense when you remember that a pointer is just an <br>address on the assembly level.<br><br>Brian<br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul,
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