I’m killing two birds with one stone here and finally taking a look at. The project is still a work in progress but you can follow how it is going on GitHub. I looked into various existing assemblers and IDEs but thought it would be more fun to try writing my own to give me a better understanding of the instructions available. But after a while I became frustrated with the speed of development on the machine itself and decided to write the code on the PC and cross-assemble. Initially, I picked up a copy of Jim Butterfield’s “Machine Language” and began working through it using Supermon on the VICE C64 emulator.
Now, with most of the books on C64 programming being freely available on the Internet, along with many other resources, I felt it was time to finally learn 6502 assembly programming (actually, 6510 on the C64).
Oddly, the thing that I most wanted to do back then was to have a loading screen on my Basic programs that drew a picture and played music while bringing the program in from the cassette. It seemed to me that so much more could be done in machine code but the resources of my local library did not support learning such things. I always felt rather disappointed by this. However, possibly due to the lack of the Internet at the time, I never learned to program it in machine code. The C64 was one of my first computers and I spent hours programming in Basic on it. Recently, I rediscovered the joy of the Commodore 64.
