Commodore C-64, Pitfall, Assembly Programming - 80's Computer And Gaming

Where has assembly programming gone to? I remember growing up in the '80s and the B

. Dalton bookstores (remember those?) being shelved full of assembly language books for the Commodore 64 personal computer. Nowadays, it seems that everything is too complicated for all but the most brilliant minds to dabble in assembly code.

Then again, technology has so improved that the principal benefit of assembly language, its speed, may be irrelevant, while the inherent incomprehensibility of the language (and you think C++ is difficult) remains a liability.

Computer languages are fascinating. And despite the obscure "look" of assembly, I remain intrigued by it. Assembly languages were first developed as second-generation languages that freed programmers from tedium such as remembering numeric codes and calculating addresses. This lead to an increase in programming productivity, and I surmise that it's this very reason that assembly has been dropped along with the rest of the '80s. Advanced hardware has made high-level languages less cost-intensive in terms of computational cycles, allowing instruction that resembles a modicum of English.

Ah, yes, the '80s. =) When a programmer could still do it all himself and become a millionaire overnight with an instant runaway hit, such as David Crane of Pitfall! fame. This title sold over four million copies at a time when home video game consoles were not as common as today, taking only ten minutes to conceive and ten thousand hours (a little over a year) to program. It was coded entirely in assembly, of course, as no high-level languages existed for consoles back then.

It was a time that will never be again, when mere hobbyists and professional programmers were not too different. The current casual gaming scene may resurrect some elements of this previous situation, as many take to developing apps for mobile gaming.

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by: Aaron Miller

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