[Coco] Space Invaders - Translated from Intel 8080 to Motorola 6809 for the CoCo 3

[Zippster]

I don’t know for sure, but I do keep hearing things about assembly programming becoming a thing of the past.
Which is a real shame if true.  Even myself as just a hobbyist building hardware for these old machines and
writing in assembly to make use of it can appreciate the level of control you have with it - right down to the
actual hardware itself.

There is an intimate understanding of how hardware and software function together that is being missed
if your programming is all higher level it would seem.  Although I understand development time is critical
and they mostly make up for it using embedded processors that are far more powerful than they need to
be (and specialized hardware) for a lot of things.

There’s something that seems a little sad to me in that, but then again, I’m looking at it from the perspective
of a hobbyist wanting to understand how things work together mostly for the sake of that understanding and
the fun of getting it all working together, and not from the angle of just trying to get a working product into
the market.

Anyway, I think I understand what you’re saying, and pretty much agree with you.  You can do a heck of a lot
with the 8-bit cpus and the control you get from machine language programming.  :)

- Ed


> On Dec 28, 2016, at 11:50 AM, Dave Philipsen <dave at davebiz.com> wrote:
> 
> And in that sense, I do agree with you Ed.  But in another sense, I truly believe that there are a lot of 'new' things that can still be done with the old 8-bitters.  Now I'm not exactly talking about the retro platforms you were referring to but more the use of the older CPUs for certain applications, perhaps embedded.  The odd thing is that so many of the newer embedded processors nowadays are being programmed in high level languages that in my mind really detract from the whole purpose behind using an embedded CPU.  Some things just still lend themselves well to getting down to the nitty gritty with machine code to make it happen.
> 
> There's also something to be said for an embedded application (or a retro computer for that matter) that can boot up almost instantaneously without having to wait for loading an operating system.  I'm still a big fan of using the old 8-bitters when the circumstances lend themselves to it and I've still been able to do some things (a few) that the guys with the new processors and high-level languages couldn't figure out how to do.  One example might be to ask a 16 or 32-bitter with a high-level language to do the equivalent of the CoCo bit-banger serial port without a hardware timer or the use of interrupts.  Another would be to create the 32 kHz modulation and data transmission of an IR LED transmitter completely with software.  It can be done but a lot of the high level programmers are left scratching their heads or asking why you just don't do it in hardware.
> 
> 
> Dave
>