Posted by indyjo 10/23/2025
The retro scene is alive and well, and in many small ways, flourishing. Even the obscure platforms get new device peripherals designed for them - among other things in my retro corner, I have a remote controllable Amstrad CPC6128 with an M4 card, putting it on a network .. a couple of ZX Spectrum variants with so much storage attached, the ‘why not just put every single spectrum game on it, ever’ question just hangs in the ether .. and an original C64 and Commodore monitor rig, sitting at one end of the city waiting for a LoRa/meshtastic session, to set it up, so we can chat with the other Oric/ZX Spectrum/Amstrad/etc. systems all over the place.
Anyway, I just want to point out, there is a very thriving retro scene, so learning assembly and participating in it, in your own way, is a very stimulating hobby. Even if you are a master of all the current tooling, learning the tools of the ancients will make you appreciate just how much bloat we tolerate, needlessly.
In any case, its often surprising where 6502/z80-like systems turn up these days, too ..
Some people are drawn to assembly and that’s great. Me personally, after a course in undergrad studying MIPS assembly, I learned to appreciate what all the compiler does for us and moved on!
While I have manually written code for Z80, 68000, x86, and MIPS, I never bothered with MIPS outside university project assignments.
It's truly wild how much a modern compiler can transform code. There are circumstances where a human can do better (mostly around SIMD optimizations) but those require you to be in situations where you doing operations on large arrays of numbers. Not extremely common in most programming (beyond maybe making totals. Which is a SIMD operation that compilers do well).
I got one of his kits and assembled it while working through his YouTube series.
(I didn't, at the time, continue very far into the assembly course, but perhaps will this Winter when I am hunkered down in the Midwaste with the blizzards beating down on my home.)
Probably my best project was a FORTH system. It used direct threading so each FORTH word was a proper assembly routine. It had primitive peephole optimization too! It was all written in 68000 assembler with K-Seka.
So if you want an assembler to learn, 68000 is a great choice. However you could learn 32 bit ARM which I came to prefer and that will still run on modern systems (at least if they have been compiled with 32 bit support or on the plentiful ARM microcontrollers).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45646958
I guess it would be nice to have a more entry level piece not just a more advanced stuff and a story. Still nice. But not that involved and getting into IT is more than involvement and interaction.