Programming the 6502
by Rodnay Zaks · first published 1978
12mentions
7recommended by
11HN commenters
2009–2026first – last mentioned
64% recommend36% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Long-running introduction to the MOS 6502 chip and its assembly language, valued by readers who learned microprocessors in the late 1970s and early 1980s and still read for nostalgia and historical context.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Programming the 6502_OCR
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Go old school and dowload this book: http://www.romhacking.net/documents/615/ 'Programming the 6502', by Rodnay Zaks.
on “Hacking Super Mario World to Warp to the Credits [video]” ↗Rodnay Zaks - Programming The 6502 - Fourth Edition - 1979 http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22092/Programming-The...
on “Ask HN: The book that did it for you in math and/or CS?” ↗Chuck Peddle is an absolute legend. The 6502 was my first microprocessor love, thanks in part to this book: https://archive.org/details/Programming_the_6502 ("Programming the 6502" by Rodnay Zaks - Actually I read the French edition by Sybex, I didn't read English at the time), and to the awesome computers that used it: Commodore, Oric, and of course Apple…
on “Oral History of Chuck Peddle (2014) [video]” ↗…had an older student at my high school teach a machine language course, complete with a one page table of opcodes and their hex values so that we could type them in. After that I purchased a copy of Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks. Books took 3 months to arrive if they were a special order like that, sometimes longer. To this day it's still one of my favourite books.
on “My first Z80 assembly language program” ↗I believe one of the "standard works" to learn 6502 back in the day was Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks. It's out of print, but it was printed in a lot of copies so you should be able to find one second-hand.
on “Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II” ↗…manuals written by Chris Espinosa and Jef Raskin are a treat to read. Would highly recommend, just to get a sense of what it was like to get onboarded on Apple II back in the day. And then obviously Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks.
on “Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II” ↗Seconded. I bought the first edition of "Programming the 6502" way back in the neolithic, and I enjoyed it greatly. I even read parts of it again now and then these days too, just because I like it. I used to write assembly on, at first, the AIM-65, and later the…
on “Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II” ↗My first 6502 program was self-modifying; I wrote it just before reading the book chapter on using registers for indexing relative to a base address. That book was Programming the 6502 by Rodney Zaks. I have some 1986-dated 6502 assembly code of mine in hard copy (on dot matrix paper with the "holes" intact). I'm going to scan it one day and post.
on “Dirty tricks 6502 programmers use” ↗…and GOSUB sucked. When I first used a freely formatted language with actual parameters and local variables, it was like ascension into heaven. Actually the moment for me was before that. In the book Programming The 6502 by Rodnay Zaks, there is a presentation of a module with recursion. I think, binary search tree or something like that. The assembly language source is given, as well as some Pascal-like pseudocode for…
on “The Consequences of One's First Programming Language” ↗…getting the short-end-of-the-stick with a C64 but I am so happy (to this day) that my first machine at home was C64. I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).
on “I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64” ↗I started in BASIC on a Sharp MZ-700 (a horrible machine) but in 1988 I got a Commodore 64 as a gift, along with a book (Programming the 6502) and got to grips with assembly after a christmas present: a freezer cartridge and a floppy disk drive. It was the best christmas present ever. Further on, my C64 interest became an obsession and I dropped…
on “Nobody told me it’s impossible, so I did it” ↗Blimey, I'd forgotten all about Rodney Zaks. I had a copy of his "Programming the 6502" book back in the early and mid 80's when I used to hack out BBC Micro sideways ROM odds and sods. What a blast from the past.
on “How the Z80's registers are implemented” ↗