1985 CREATIVE COMPUTING - APPLECART CONTEST

6502 ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE NONSENSE

I can't quite remember the name of the 6502 symbolic assembler I was using, but I remember it came in a small brown vinyl "leather" binder on 5.25" floppy diskette (UPDATE: it was LISA).

A grade school student spending 1/8th of his annual earnings on an assembler? Madness!

I do recall this winning contest entry as having some ridiculously small number of bytes, like 256 or 512. And that's a fair amount of code in 8-bit assembly. I did not understand the relationship between frequency and tuning a major scale, so the notes in the nonsense musical synthesizer got progressively sour as the register went up.

Although the contest results were published in 1985, I seem to recall actually testing the program on the Apple ][+ in Louise Robbins' science classroom. I never could afford an Apple ][+ series machine.



CREATIVECOMPUTING_SEPTEMBER_1985.pdf (SOURCE: archive.org)

This was my bible:

6502 Assembly Language Programming by Lance A. Leventhal A comprehensive and classic book.