I remember poking values into memory on the apple iie.
That was back when things were simpler.
But then…so were the results. I wouldn’t go back at all 
I miss those times. But I don’t want to go back to them.
When I was a kid I read a book on ZX Spectrum machine code, and that was enough to put me off! Then I was fooled by an April Fools joke in a Spectrum magazine, which claimed that an amazing new easy game creation tool was coming soon. Many years later I got Unity Pro and I could carry on where my imagination was bitterly crushed all those years ago 
I loved The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly book for all the inner details of the ROM. Very useful little tomb. There was of course the various C64, BBC, Atari ST and Amiga books that lined my shelves as well. The things we had before the internet…
LOL, I remember writing my games in Turbo Pascal + Assembly.
Ldfm r13! {r0-r4}
Cmp #0
Bneq xxx
Forgive me as my arm3 might be a bit rusty
It is funny but I still remember a lot of the 6502 and Z80 hex values for various opcodes, e.g. $00 for BRK, $A9 for LDA immediate, $60 for RTS, $EA for NOP, and so on. Various zero page addresses in C64, BBC and Speccy. Trap numbers from the ST and Amiga. Those were the days when editors really didn’t auto-complete anything for you and you just wound up memorizing addresses and values through repeated usage. I have done any serious ARM/THUMB programming in several years.
The funny thing is that now in 2012 at school we program PICAXE pic microchips with BASIC
they are 4mhz of over cocked to 8mhz and are less then a centremeter long and wide
It was guru mediation vs. what the fuck does the compiler want to tell me?
Nothing more terrifying than seeing a Guru Meditation box** just moments after realising that you saved your Devpac files to RAMDisk instead of the Floppy disk because just seconds before you were thinking “I will just put in this MOVE.W #$FFFF,D0 to reset the loop counter, that won’t make it crash so I’ll be safe to save to RAMDisk” but instead typed “MOVE.L #$FFFFFFFF,D0” which now means the loop counter just overwrote everything in RAM. Best thing I ever purchased back then was the $800 40MB HD for the A500.
** We implemented a Guru Meditation handler on our PSX games too for handling crashes during debugging.
:O)
That’s why we made memdumps of the system to a Golem Box and used a trackloader routine to restore the wanted state. Here, for some reason the juggler sound doesn’t work in the latest webplayers anymore and you need to go fullscreen to avoid some stuttering.
This was how I learned assembly on the ZX Spectrum:
I also wrote a z80 assembler/disassembler for the Spectrum to make it easier. Given that I was 11 at the time, I must have been a strange child.
Our bible (beside of Exec, Libs&Devs, Intuition), full of registers and typos.
As for 68k assembly, you just learned that from some example codes and the rather small manual which came with the assembler, but it worked.
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tear of nostalgia
Since the 80s at least the compiler always told what was wrong. The big thing being how long you had to wait. Waiting at least overnight, I filled out bubble cards in high school for our math teacher and Cobol and IBM were still big enough that jcl and assembly on the IBM 360 was mandatory via batch jobs in college.
That’s not saying I didn’t have friends that programmed memory directly and I did a little bit but that was only inputting the data not the instructions.
Overnight ???
Lucky kids. The only time ever got to touch an Amiga was when I drooled over it at the store in all its 16 color glory.
Then I’d go home and stare at my 4 color PC.
Let’s say the first Amiga had 4096 colours and even if you used four bitplanes only which means you had 16 colours, due to the Copper and changing colour registers on the fly, you still had a lot more.
Compilers have always told you what you’re doing wrong, just to varying degrees along with what’s acceptable tending to change. For example I recently dusted off some old code that compiled clean with gcc3 in 2000. The same code with the latest compiler threw so many warnings it was frightening.
Even the old 6502 assemblers and machine language monitors mentioned previously had some sort of basic validity checking. Cannot JSR across page boundaries, etc.
The bare bones programming you’re talking about would look something like this.
I’ve often found it interesting that the general public knows nothing of COBOL or RPG, considering the two languages combined probably still comprise 80% of the world’s business logic.
I’m curious, were those colors usable in a general way, or were they only for copper bands?