Programming in assembler (again)

At the beginning of the year I became interested in programming in assembler again. I had my first experiences in assembler at the end of the 1980s with the CPU 6510 from MOS Technology on the C64 (like many others, I'm sure). Different variants of this 8-bit CPU were used in many well-known computers at the time, such as the Apple I and Apple II, the Atari 800XL and the BBC Micro, as well as in games consoles, such as the Atari 2600 or the NES from Nintendo.

But which hardware with which CPU should it be now? I didn't want it to be too complicated and I didn't want to buy any extra hardware or software. My first choice was the Raspberry Pi 400 and the Arduino Nano ESP32, as I have both devices here at home.

But after a while, I felt more and more to (re)working with the 6510. However, not on the old original hardware (I'm not doing it to myself again to work with a 40 x 25 display), but with an emulator, more precisely with VICE. There are several development environments for the C64 that use the VICE as a target system. These include the C64 Studio by Georg Rottensteiner and the CBM prg Studio by Arthur Jordison. Both are complete IDEs with good support for creating graphics and sound.

But I decided to use VS Code with the extension vs64. On the one hand I like to use VS Code and on the other hand VS Code offers many other features that I don't want to miss. In addition to the vs64 extension, the cross assembler must also be installed. For the cross assembler I decided to use ACME.

The assembler program for the C64 can be developed in VS Code and loaded from there directly onto the VICE and also debugged. It is interesting that a modern development environment supports a platform that is over 40 years old.

Cross development on the PC for the C64 cannot be compared with development on the C64. Without much effort and without extra hardware, I can (once again) do some programming in assembler. Plenty of free documentation about the 6502/6510 can be found on archive.org.

Let's see how the topic continues. The C64 has an RS232 interface and I still have a BC8150 around here, also with an RS232...