When, specifically, did you get enamoured by the 6502?

[sark02]

This is a spin on the common, "Why do you like the 6502?" thread, but I think it would be fun to hear when, for you, the 6502 went from being just another CPU on the market to the one you developed a particular fondness or affinity for. The 6502 was better and worse than what came before it, and it was better and worse than what came after it. But it remains a favorite, or a stalwart tool, or fond nostalgia. When did it become a favorite for you, and why?

For me, the 6502 on the Atari 800XL (around 1985) was the second CPU I learned to write assembly code in. My first was the Z80 on the ZX Spectrum. Like a first love, I'd suppose it's most common for people to remember their first CPU fondly, as the thing that taught them the most, perhaps. For me, though, although I could string together some Z80, plot a pixel, handle an interrupt, I actually had fun on the 6502, and I wrote at least an order of magnitude more code. The fun aspect was due to the custom hardware on the Atari, which focused my efforts on achieving specific fun goals. Working with the horridly slow Atari Editor Assembler cartridge also made each accomplishment feel artificially more triumphant than it probably was!

Although I wrote more 68000 overall (from the 16-bit home computer era) and I've posted my appreciation for the 6809, the 6502 remains a special favorite.

So for me, specifically, the 6502 on the Atari was my first fun engagement with assembly language, and that's why I remember it.

[drogon]

When? 1978. What? The Apple II and a few years later the BBC Micro. (1981)

I think you said it: Fun.

I did work (as in paid-for work) on other systems during that time (assembler and other languages - 8080/Z80, Prime, PDP11, Elliot 903), but the 6502 was the fun one I could do colour graphics and sound with and the paid-for work on the 6502 systems I'd designed and used didn't seem too bad as I could still have fun ...

-Gordon

[BigEd]

Interesting! For me I'm afraid the 6502 was the first micro I coded on, and so I can't claim any great discernment. The great bulk of my nostalgia is for the Beeb and other lesser 6502 machines - although I like to think I can appreciate many other MPUs and CPUs, and take a broad historical interest. It's only in the last few weeks that I've dabbled with the Z80.

[barrym95838]

1981 for me, shortly after I got my Apple ][+. I mis-typed a DATA statement for a Moon Landing game in Softside Magazine and was plunked from BASIC into the Apple's machine language monitor. I already had a wondrous appreciation for the speed of machine language from my limited TRS-80 Model I experiences at school with "Invasion Force" and "Dancing Demon", but I had never pursued learning Z80 assembly due to lack of on-hand support. Woz generously provided me with just enough support to catch the 6502 bug, and I will always be thankful that he did, because it has been an immense joy for me ever since. I picked up some Z80, PDP-8, PDP-11, IBM 360, 8008, 6800, 6809, 68000, and even a little 8086 assembly language along the way (at least enough to easily recognize them as a source file target), but none of those can hold a candle to 6502 assembly in my mind ... first love and all ...

[sark02]

barrym95838 wrote:

I mis-typed a DATA statement for a Moon Landing game in Softside Magazine [...]

The experience of mis-typing listings from magazines from the late 70s and early 80s is the kind of shared experience in frustration that I'm not sure has a parallel today. A couple of days ago I found, at archive.org, the edition of Your Computer that had a flight simulator program for the ZX Spectrum that I had typed in (and couldn't ever get it to work due to my own mistakes) back in the day. Here it is: https://archive.org/details/your-comput ... 2/page/n37. As an aside, that edition also has a "Forth simulator" for the ZX81 (in BASIC), and some other fun little things.

Perhaps it was the experience of NOT copying games from magazines for my Atari or any future computer that kept these things fun vs. the Spectrum. I also suspect the not fun experience of trying these programs prompted me to pack that in and start writing my own programs.

[BillO]

After buying my Ohio Scientific Superboard-II in 1979. I wasn't my first 6502 system though. That was a KIM-1 I got in 1978, but I was much more into the Intel 8080 until the Superboard came along.

[BigEd]

(Yes, I should have said: perhaps 1980 would be my first machine, a 6502-based UK101, which was a near-clone of a Superboard. I had my copy of Zaks well before my next machine, a BBC Micro in, maybe, 1982. On the first machine, I would have had to assemble by hand. On the Beeb, there's an assembler built into the Basic.)

[cjs]

6502 was the first assembly language I learned (back in the early '80s), but I wouldn't say I was all that enamoured of it; I far preferred the 6809 once I bought a CoCo (with disk drives and OS-9!) a few years later.

It was actually quite recently that I developed real admiration for the 6502. I've taken up coding for it again (switching away from 6809 mainly because all my retrocomputer-club friends seem to have C64s) and it's only now that I'm starting to understand the beauty and cleverness in its design trade-offs, rather than just being frustrated by them.

[Tor]

I started writing 6502 assembly on the AIM-65 at around the time it became available, and I think I started to love the 6502 after I bought the Zaks book - it's a delight to read.

[raccoon]

I bought a C64 in 1984. Soon I was dissatisfied with its performance in BASIC. That's when I purchased a (dis)assembler cartridge.
Later I found out the 6502 is one of the simplest CPUs around. I still like it mainly for its simplicity.

[kakemoms]

I started with a Vic-20 in 1983, but never had any games for it, so I ended up making some in Basic. After a few months I started testing out small segments of assembly code, but all was done on paper manually, so it was mostly small routines. I then made a platform game in Basic/assembly with monsters chasing the player around. My class mates enjoyed it, but we had no idea of making money of out it (and my Father tought it was a waste of time).

Later I have programmed the 68000-series in assembly and C. I then went onto IBM System/36 mini machines, later AS/400 (which had a 68020) and RPG-II and III programming. That was before I left for university and started studying physics instead.

[SimonJ5]

Like most people who hide out here, I first came across the 6502 in the late 70s - the Microtan 65 system to be precise. The Commodore Pet (singular) was the computer at school although it was only ever programmed in Basic. The Microtan 65 was a typical niche machine from that time that had 1k of RAM and you had to hand assemble code for it but it was still amazing what people squeezed into the available 200-or-so bytes.

One of my first professional coding jobs was writing 68000 assembler which the 6502 put me in an excellent place however I don't miss the hand assembling and calculating 'backward' jump offsets!

One of the above comments talked about 'first love' - I can recall the 6502 far better than my early experiences with romance and it was more successful...

[barrym95838]

[oops]