Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> I just wrote the assembly on a piece of paper, and when the program was 
> properly finished, it'd do the "assembling" part by hand. (I.e., open my 
> dad's book and leaf through the op-code table.)

Hand assembly was actually a common practice until 16-bit processors 
made this too troublesome; with at most 256 opcodes to remember 
(although the 6809[1] had prefix opcodes that made the following opcode 
take on a different meaning), many 8-bit assembly programmers were 
perfectly capable of reading and writing the opcodes directly from/to a 
memory listing.

> Eventually I tired of this, and wrote my old assembler.

The C64 had a cartridge port on the back end, and one fine company put 
out a cartridge called HESMon, which provided a mini-assembler, memory 
dump and editing, and so on.  I could have used the mini-assembler, but 
opcodes were two keystrokes while mnemonics were three, so for the sake 
of speed I usually typed the opcodes.  The monitor would disassemble 
them for me so I caught any errors quickly.

Regards,
John


[1] The 6809 was the nicest, IMHO, of the 8-bit processors.  It had 
hardware multiply and sixteen-bit index registers (with preincrement and 
postdecrement).  Code for that processor was usually smaller than the 
6502 equivalent.

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