I'm on a mission to learn ASM. It's going to be difficult at the beginning but in a few years I guess I can master it.
Learning ASM
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/Steve. -
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As strange as this may sound, there is a game (probably more) on Steam that may be helpful. (Making learning fun can be quite helpful for some learners.) Check out https://store.steampowered.com/app/792100/7_Billion_Humans/ . It's visual, but it definitely reminds me of my days learning 6502 assembler.... the instructions you visualize are very close to 6502 assembler. It will probably go on sale at some point, so if you don't think it's worth full price, stick it on your wishlist and wait for a sale notification. Also, I suspect some other games on Steam may also be in a similar category and get recommended to you. (Such as ASTRA-256 Assembler, Shenzhen I/O, TIS-100 .)
I don’t know is your are trying to learn assembly to make money or just for fun or both, but it you are try to make money in general by making software I would be careful. It does not seem clear to me what languages and development tools people make employment decision want the people working on the code to be investing time and money into. But I think that understanding assembly is helpful in understanding how computers work and in my mind it helps understand higher level languages.
Going to check that game out! Want to learn 6502 assembler as well. As a kid I had a Commodore 64 and that was magic to me. Was a little bit too young at the time to understand what was happening when reading the code. But now, almost 40 years later, I should be able to understand (some of) it). Bought a second hand Commdore 64 a few months ago, so I have a real 6502 available. Or actually, a 6510, but I understand that's not actually that different.
There are different assembly languages for different CPUs. Steve did say on a different twit podcast that a thing call a TI launchpad could be used to learn assembly, but it is not x86 assembly. I think the TI launchpad has a small instruction set like maybe 40 instruction.
I asked ChatGPT “in the most fundamental way, when programming a generic von Neumann computer, what be the most essential assembly instructions?” It gave a pretty good answer, so I copied and pasted it into a word processing document and saved the response. Later, I posted the response on Pavel Yosifovich blog. The blog was about his x86 64 bit programming course. Some one was asking for resources learning assembly. I decided to share my thoughts. Here is the link:
https://scorpiosoftware.net/2023/11/02/x64-architecture-and-programming-class/
Do you know about Ben Eater on YouTube? If not, you should. He's building a 6502 computer from first principles. https://www.youtube.com/@BenEater
Ben is cool. Most of what he's doing is beyond me, but I love his no-nonsense matter-of-fact "glitzless" style.
Simple "Hello World!" program that works under FreeDOS...
Compiling Code...
Code:
org 0x100 ; Code starts at offset 100h
use16 ; Use 16-bit code
mov ax,0900h ; DOS function: AX = 0900h (Show Message)
mov dx,hello ; DX = "Hello World!$"
int 21h ; Call a DOS function: AX = 0900h (Show Message)
mov ax,4c00h ; DOS function: AX = 4c00h (Exit)
int 21h ; Call a DOS function: AX = 4c00h (Exit)
hello db "Hello World!$"Compiling Code...
Code:
nasm hello.asm -o hello.com
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Dave's garage did a tutorial on writing in asm. I think this one even has a shout-out to Steve in it.
I think that the most important thing for learning MASM (x86 ASM) is having a truly comfortable development environment.
Assuming you're using Windows, everyone raves about the free Visual Studio Community Edition . You'll need to get MASM's tools which are now also available at no charge from Microsoft. Once you have those things in place, you'll have a very comfortable environment where you can write, edit, debug (single step and view registers and memory, etc.)
Then you'll have an environment where you're COMFORTABLY able to write x86 assembly code that looks like this:
Assuming you're using Windows, everyone raves about the free Visual Studio Community Edition . You'll need to get MASM's tools which are now also available at no charge from Microsoft. Once you have those things in place, you'll have a very comfortable environment where you can write, edit, debug (single step and view registers and memory, etc.)
Then you'll have an environment where you're COMFORTABLY able to write x86 assembly code that looks like this:
Watched a few of the 6502 series. Very informative. He explains everthing very well at just the right speed (for me). Thanks for mentioning his channel!
I never got very far with this, but I'll throw in a link to Maria Markstedter's site in case you're interested in a bit of Arm assembly. She's approaching it from a security research point of view. Pretty easy to find an old Raspberry Pi to practice on.
azeria-labs.com
Writing ARM Assembly (Part 1)
Yes, I just sent Microsoft another email asking about their developer licenses. OMG it is boring reading software licenses. If they actually email me back and I decide to buy some software from them I will ask why visual studio is so blotted. It would be really cool to have Steve's brain.
Well really the brain of any one really good at 32-bit or 64-bit intel assembler.
I wonder if Visual Studio Code could be used instead of the full Visual Studio? Out of the box, Code supports Typescript/JavaScript and C# (and maybe HTML and CSS, as its target is for web developers) but you can install plugins to support more stuff (I think MS has some Python support as well, which I only know about because I added the plugin for Jupyter Notebook, and it installed Python language support as a result)
I'm sure there's ASM language support. You would need to install the MASM Tools Steve linked at the very least.
I'm sure there's ASM language support. You would need to install the MASM Tools Steve linked at the very least.
You could always just use an open source assembler like FASM (Flat Assembler 2)
Discussion thread for FASM - https://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=22855
FASM syntax
FAQ on FASM vs MASM
The Fresh IDE with FASM built in.
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That also looks like a great learning tool. What's not clear is whether a debugging facility is also integrated? For learning, an integrated debugging facility is SO important. That's what Visual Studio Code offers, and since it's free and the MASM tools are free, that's what I would recommend for Windows users.
When I try to download MASM's tools. I get this message
We're sorry, this download is no longer available.Similar threads
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