Collaborate Disseminate
Have you ever wanted to develop a playable game small enough to fit into a disk’s 512 byte boot sector? How about watching somebody develop a program in assembly for nearly two hours? If you answered yes to either of those questions, or ideally both of them, you’re going to …read more
Continue reading Boot Sector Pong as a Crash Course in Assembly
Learning a new skill is fun, especially one that could land you a new job. We don’t think you’ll find too much demand for PDP-11 assembly language programmers, but if it still interests you, check out [ChibiAkumas’s] video that starts a series on that subject for “absolute beginners.”
The PDP-11 …read more
Continue reading Learn PDP-11 Assembly for Fun but Probably No Profit
We know the 6502 isn’t exactly the CPU of choice for today’s high-performance software, but with the little CPU having appeared in so many classic computers — the Apple, the KIM-1, The Commodores, to name a few — we have a real soft spot for it. [Janne] has a post …read more
We recently heard it said of a hacker who pulled off a particularly nice VGA hack on an 8-bit microcontroller: “He knows all the bits, personally.” High praise, indeed. If you want to get on a first-name basis with a ton of transistors, then have a look at [Heinz D]’s …read more
It’s entirely possible to do your coding in vim or emacs, hammering out hotkeys to drive the interface and bring your code to life. While working in such a way has its charms, it can be confronting to new coders, and that’s before even considering trying to understand command line compiler settings. The greenhorn coder may find themselves more at home in the warm embrace of an IDE, and [morrows_end] has now built one for those working with AVR assembly code.
The IDE goes by the name of Simple AVR IDE, or savr_ide for short. Programmed in C++ with the …read more
The United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) is planning to release its internally developed reverse engineering tool for free at the upcoming RSA security conference 2019 that will be held in March in San Francisco.
The existence of the framewor… Continue reading NSA to release its GHIDRA reverse engineering tool for free
We live in a time when you don’t have to know assembly language to successfully work with embedded computers. The typical processor these days has resources that would shame early PCs and some of the larger ones are getting close to what was a powerful desktop machine only a few years ago. Even so, there are some cases where you really want to use assembly language. Maybe you need more speed. Or maybe you need very precise control over timing. Maybe you just like the challenge. [Robert G. Plantz] from Sonoma State University has an excellent book online titled “Introduction …read more
We got a question from [DC Darsen], who apparently has a broken electronic organ from the mid-70s that needs a new top-octave generator. A top-octave generator is essentially an IC with twelve or thirteen logic counters or dividers on-board that produces an octave’s worth of notes for the cheesy organ in question, and then a string of divide-by-two logic counters divide these down to cover the rest of the keyboard. With the sound board making every pitch all the time, the keyboard is just a simple set of switches that let the sound through or not. Easy-peasy, as long as …read more
Continue reading Ask Hackaday Answered: The Tale of the Top-Octave Generator
Imagine having to program your computer by rewiring it. For a brief period of time around the mid-1940s, the first general-purpose electronic computers worked that way. Computers like ENIAC initially had no internal storage for code. Programming it involved manipulating thousands of switches and cables. The positions of those switches and cables were the program.
Kathleen Booth began working on computers just as the idea of storing the program internally was starting to permeate through the small set of people building computers. As a result, she was one of the first programmers to work on software and is credited with …read more
Continue reading Kathleen Booth: Assembling Early Computers While Inventing Assembly
Based on [Ben Jojo’s] title — x86 Assembly Doesn’t have to be Scary — we assume that normal programmers fear assembly. Most hackers don’t mind it, but we also don’t often have an excuse to program assembly for desktop computers.
In fact, the post is really well suited for the typical hacker because it focuses the on real mode of an x86 processor after it boots. What makes this tutorial a little more interesting than the usual lecture is that it has interactive areas, where a VM runs your code in the browser after assembling with NASM.
We really like …read more