Re: Converting 6502 Asm to PIC

[Allen Bong <allenbsf6502@gmail.com>]

On Dec 3, 1:21 am, sc...@alfter.DIESPAMMERSDIE.us (Scott Alfter)
wrote:
> In article <ee14f5c9-9b7e-412b-944c-a4bb4cf6e...@r21g2000pri.googlegroups.com>,
> PIC Newbie  <allenbsf6...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >It seems your PIC knowledge is not rusty at all.  Do assembler
> >programmers treat all the CPU the same, ie someone who started with
> >6502 can easily learn 8086 or Z800 or 68030 in a short time?
>
> It depends on the architecture.  I started with 6809 assembly on my
> grandfather's CoCo back in '83 or '84 and found moving to the 6502 on my IIe
> a year or so later was fairly easy.  8086 assembly in a college course a few
> years after that seemed a bit more of a challenge at the time, but I suspect
> some of that was from not yet having developed the ability to move between
> languages somewhat easily.  (Some of it, some might argue, was just the
> brain-damaged nature of the 8086. :-) )
>
>   _/_
>  / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
> (IIGS(http://alfter.us/ ;          Top-posting!
>  \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden            >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?
>
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For me, it was just the opposite.  I learned 6502 in 1980 with OSI C1P
then Apple 2, Few years later, I learnt 6809 on an SBC and the Micro
magazine.  I found that 6809 was so much powerful than the 6502 and
its nice instruction set.  I quickly fell in love with it.  I then
learnt 8086 in the 90's on PC with the help of the book by Peter
Norton.  I was fasinated by the powerful function calls using
interrupts.  But the instructions were hard to remember and the
segment regosters were hard to handle and confusing.  I concluded that
8086 is only good for high level languages like C, it is not going to
be my favourite CPU.

Years followed, I learned 8031, 8085, 6803, 89cxxxx and then finally
PIC.  Each has their advantages and disadvantages.  I learned 8085 and
6803 because I have plenty of them from outdated PCBs sitting around
idoling and I made simple SBC just to light LEDs and learned their
instructions and how to program them.  the 8031 was nice to learn and
I ordered them from a Canadian company making what they called "EMC32"
boards.  They came with RS232 and a nice monitor program.  I program
its static RAM serially and I did a lot of projects with them.

The PIC's instructions set was the poorest among all but it has so
much IO functions built in and that some sort compensate its
deficiencies.  It is also widely supported on the net and most of the
cool projects were done with them like the propeller clock, 12F675
poorman's oscilloscope in software, 50 MHz Freq counter, Digital
industance/capacitance meter,  were just some of them.  Even the
bicycle computer, published on the net, that I am going to build was
using a 16F628 PIC.

Recently I also play with the SBC-2 by Daryl Rictors and micro KIM by
Vince Briel.  I have also made the 1802 ELF using some ply-wood for
the frame as I have some hex LED with decoder and driver built in left
over from a MFC display equipment.  And last but not least the 68HC11,
I did make an SBC but did not toy with it much.  I have no plans on
ATMega or AVR or ARM or DSP.  But I like to make small gadgets with
PIC for my bicycle like an "SOS" morse code beckon that I mount on the
back of my bike run on 3x AA batteries.

Actually playing with 6502 or PIC gave me lots of fun, as you started
to collect good sub-routines and make them into macros and libraries.
Everything you wanted to do are just copy and paste like playing with
Lego bricks.

Allen