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Comment by djcb | Hacker News Reader

Had a lot of (slightly masochistic) fun programming the Z80 back in the day on my MSX2 machine.

I didn't have an assembler, so I wrote my code by taking the opcodes from a table, calculating offsets etc., then turning them into DATA-lines in an MSX-Basic program, which POKEd the code into RAM, then CALL into the starting address.

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Same here! And i'm not sure was is masochistic about it; I still write software for the MSX2 like that now ;) I only knew about Hisoft assembler and that was too expensive so I never learned anything different than opcodes.

nostalgia :) The simple logical simplicity of this

http://pastraiser.com/cpu/i8080/i8080_opcodes.html

allowed, after some short time without even looking at the table, to type the binary code directly in (our preferred way of the Forth words implementation back then, on Russian 8080 clone of course :).

When I got my MSX from the attic after almost 30 years I still remembered almost all the opcodes. Took me few days to relearn the rest; I was 8 when I memorised them...

My first intro to microprocessors was the Z80 book published by Howard Sams. I never actually tried using one, but the book was so well written that it gave me an excellent foundation.

I'd probably recommend one of the older uP's for anybody who is just getting started, as they are so much simpler.

Ah yes, so much power going the assembly code route, it took me a while to shake it. Started entering opcodes in the z80, and thought that Masm was as good as it could get. Was still doing Windows x86 assembly programming, until I found another way.

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