The one thing I lamented about the Apple II Plus (vs. the original with Integer BASIC) was that to make room for autostart, they had to rip out the mini-assembler in the Monitor ROM. That was the closest thing I ever saw to an assembly-language REPL before this. At least they were able to keep the disassembler.
EvanAnderson 3 hours ago [-]
I remember being so confused, as a 10 y/o kid, trying to follow examples from an Apple II-era book on my public library's Apple IIe computers. I didn't understand why I couldn't get the mini assembler to work. The idea that features would be removed on future machines simply didn't occur to me. I guess I really didn't even understand that the IIe was a different machine than what the book was written for since most everything else worked as-expected.
kevin_thibedeau 2 hours ago [-]
The mini-assembler was still available from Integer BASIC on II+ and IIe. It returned to ROM for later IIe models.
boomlinde 4 hours ago [-]
It's common in the C64 world to use freezer cartridges that allow you to interrupt normal operation and invoke a monitor program. These typically include rudimentary assemblers and disassemblers as well. Fun and useful for patching and reverse engineering!
boomlinde 2 hours ago [-]
Btw, I've only had a rough idea of how these are actually implemented, non-maskable interrupt something-something, and never knew how they make sure that the interrupt vector points to some persistent routine that can invoke the monitor. I found this great article explaining at least how The Final Cartridge 3 does it (in the first two sections): https://www.pagetable.com/282
ErroneousBosh 20 minutes ago [-]
The BBC Micro and the Atom that came before it had an assembler built into BASIC. Just think, in the early 80s you could do inline assembly if your BASIC code wasn't fast enough...
abecedarius 3 hours ago [-]
I felt the same way.
There was another downside, that the Applesoft BASIC license gave Microsoft a hostage which they later used to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBASIC. Hard to tell how much it mattered that the Mac came with no user programmability, which had been expected for PCs till then.
Gracana 2 hours ago [-]
Wow, somehow I didn't know about this. Now I'm angry, bundling an official Macintosh BASIC on every computer would have been huuuge for young-me.
I also wish I could select from the completion list with Tab without typing more of the instruction, fish-style. I.e., you press Tab to go through completion 1, completion 2, ..., completion N, completion 1 again with Enter to confirm your pick.
torutofu 4 hours ago [-]
the fun part is how fast you can get back into Z80 muscle memory once the repl is giving you immediate feedback
j4cobgarby 5 hours ago [-]
Really nice! Would be fun if there were a few examples that could be loaded into memory
corbinvachal 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
2 hours ago [-]
Marbleferry815 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 17:15:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://github.com/jhallen/exorsim
There was another downside, that the Applesoft BASIC license gave Microsoft a hostage which they later used to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBASIC. Hard to tell how much it mattered that the Mac came with no user programmability, which had been expected for PCs till then.
With that said, I love the idea.