I was wondering if there is a loosely agreed upon "best practice" for when to use a particular number base when coding in 6502 (among other) assembly.

I basically ind myself using hex for everything. For instance, I would never use anything but base 10 for loop indexing in C (seems silly to even consider otherwise), yet in assembly I use hex. In fact I never use base ten anywhere. Just sort became a habit that came from who knows where. I do use binary when specific bits are being dealt with (same as I do in C).

Is there a kinda standard that folks use? Mostly just curious.

Use whatever is most clear for the situation. For example, if you're ANDing out one or more particular bits, binary is most preferable. Next is hex if you really don't have room for binary, like when the line is getting too long. When there's an implication about the address decoding, you'll probably want hex—definitely not decimal! Use decimal in other situations where it's not particularly related to the machine. Even that's not an "always" case though, for example when handling angles and you represent the 360° circle with 0-$FFFF, and hex makes it clear which quadrant you're in, and the four quadrants start at 0, $4000, $8000, and $C000, nice round numbers.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I think I tend to use hex too. It's an easy source of error to read 10 as $10, or vice versa. So consistency helps, and as Garth says, hex is natural for addresses and for many constants too. I don't use binary - I've used enough hex that I know what $80 means.

In most of my programs I use decimal for "values," such as the number of interrupts per second or the X-Y coordinates on the screen. I use binary for anything that involves bitwise manipulation, such as performing a Boolean operation,configuring device registers or extracting a flag from a bit field. I most often use hexadecimal when accessing memory or I/O devices is involved.

As Ed and Garth said, use what is most natural to you. As your 6502 assembly language skills improve you will develop a sixth sense for when each base is appropriate.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I don't use binary notation at all. I use hexadecimal for addresses and bit masks. I use decimal for loop counters and their kin.

Mike B.

Whaddya got against all those ones and zeros?

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

You can also do bit definitions in a symbolic way instead of defining them as binaries.

enable_bit equ 4
start_bit equ 0
some_IO_register equ $B000

LDA #(1<<enable_bit)|(1<<start_bit)
STA some_IO_register

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6502 sources on GitHub: https://github.com/Klaus2m5

Too dang many of them. My brain can instantly translate hex to binary, and hex is easier to read and less typo-prone, at least for me.

Mike B.

I know what you mean. After a while, one one looks just like another one.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!