techhub.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A hub primarily for passionate technologists, but everyone is welcome

Administered by:

Server stats:

4.6K
active users

#assembler

1 post1 participant0 posts today

Today, with an unusual follow-up project. This #Thomson #TO7-70, sold almost exclusively in France, was donated to us almost fully equipped. Various cartridges including an #assembler, floppy drive with controller, light pen, etc.
Unfortunately, the keyboard membrane was completely broken at the connectors, and all attempts with silver paint and conductive adhesive foil failed. And I couldn't find a replacement anywhere, so I bought a second, defective one in the hope that its membrane was still in working order :) And it is, keyboard fully functional.
#RetroComputing #France #Tinkering

Replied in thread

@rc2014 @electron_greg back in school we had a special, modular custom-bus based #intel8085 system to teach us about computers and programming.

It also had a switch panel and I fondly remember looking up opcodes in a photocopied table so that I knew which value to "toggle" next on the switches before writing it to a memory address. Hands on computing, the real way.

It was called #MFA (microcomputer für ausbildung - microcomputer for training) and it also ran CP/M and featured a #Siemens #SPS module (god, I hate SPS).

It was this system I learned #intel8085 #assembler on.

P.S.: I guess this baby and the fond memory I have of it made me fall in love with #rc2014 decades later ...

Continued thread

Hmmm.... maybe @ for "pc-relative address operator"....

previous instruction: -1@
current instruction: 0@
next instruction: 1@

and so on...

Or any number of '<'s or '>'s to represent the address the instruction that many before or after...

li x3, 5
mul x5, x3, 10
stw x5, (x7)
subi x3, x3, 1
bnez x3, <<<

(I probably could have already implemented local labels in the time I've been considering this)

Decision: Since I'm already depending on the existence of a C compiler to be able to build the stage0 transpiler and the softrisc32 emulator, the C preprocessor will serve as an adequate tool for generating test case boilerplate, etc, without requiring me to implement assembler macros or introduce further dependencies.

I think I always knew this, but a bit of research just now reminds me that gnu assembler tends to support *multiple* comment characters, which differ from target to target, and sometimes differ in behaviour depending on where they are horizontally, etc...

(gas 2.9.1 manual snippet included for reference)

I am ALL for #AI and #Claude and #GPT, etc. I do however, in my free time outside of work, school and creating STEM tutorials to help the next generation, believe that spending time in pure #Assembler in a bare-metal #Embedded #microcontroller will help you understand #Computer #Science in a way that can help you drive the future in #technology. I have and will continue to post pure Assembler drivers to help others achieve this utilizing #Arduino and #STM32 products.