'Hello world' for monitor mode and an assembler?

[Alistair J Ross <mail@ataliross.co.uk>]

Hello All,

I'm playing with xKEGS today and It's quite fun. Plus it's the only A2
emulator I've had working on my Linux box as of current writing.

I'm looking for a little piece of advice from someone who has knowledge of
writing low level code on the Apple II (Michael Mahon?).

Basically I want to learn the very basics of the 6502, but more
particularly, just how to code on the machines level. I know a number of
high level languages, but every time I go to low level I get confused
between typing programs into an assembler (I take it I need to get an
assembler to do this?), and maybe finding out how to just entering the hex
into the monitor to get the program running. If I need an assembler, what
one should I use?

All I want to do at the moment is enter the monitor (from call-151) and
type a 'hello world' program which dumps me back to the prompt. However, I
would love to have a line-by-line step through. I've looked everywhere on
the net for such a thing and I can't find that little kickstart I need. I
even bought the Apple II 'Red Book' Reference from Ebay, but it doesn't
really cover this.

The only time I ever did assembler was using DEBUG in MS DOS a long time
ago. Now was that assembler, or was that just adding raw hex into the
system for it to do stuff? Or am I completely confused?

Finally, how do I know what hex values represent which operator. In Debug,
I'm sure that the command DB 'text' would register the string 'text', and
you could make a loop to print the contents of it out. What are the
operators for the 6502 (are they the ones in the red book).

Many thanks in advance,

Alistair Ross

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