Assembly Programming is Hard…

[@KurisuYamato]

Low Level Format command: Some Assembly Required.

[@badscrew4023]

it's a win

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

I think you just won the Internet for the day! 🤣

[@UsagiElectric]

Got a good chuckle out of me!

[@Dinnye01]

@CompuSAR you have been summoned!

[@TeraunceFoaloke]

ow!

[@vikjes]

Hearing a Texan saying "It's so hot" is kind of scary...

[@mysock351C]

As a former Houstonite it’s hard to say which was worse. The 95-100 with humidity, or desert heat. I had to spend five hours on a roof in 117 degree desert air and you don’t get soaking wet since it’s so dry. Instead it just made me go slowly insane. I can imagine Dubai will just be that much worse.

[@DrewskisBrews]

You can take that to the bank

[@PhilWheatInAustin]

@@DrewskisBrews I should have scrolled down before making my top level comment. I should have known it was going to be a duplicate.

[@foxyfoxington2651]

@@mysock351C Once you get above 110 humidity becomes irrelevant. It just sucks.

[@GGigabiteM]

@@foxyfoxington2651 Humidity is very relevant, with high heat and high humidity, sweating is no longer effective at controlling body temperature and it's easier to overheat and stroke out. You could be covered from head to toe in sweat, with every bit of clothing as wet as you jumped into a river and you can still overheat due to it not evaporating. There's not much you can do in this situation but find somewhere with A/C, a stiff breeze or jump in a cold body of water. High heat and low humidity, sweating is extremely effective if you can stay out of the sun and stay hydrated. Both situations are dangerous, but knowing what to do can mean the difference of living and stroking out.

[@scottlarson1548]

My favorite story of writing assembly code was when Gates and Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter on a PDP-10 at Harvard using an 8080 emulator. When Paul Allen was on the plane to New Mexico to deliver the interpreter to Ed Roberts at MITS, he suddenly realized that he had no code to *load* the interpreter on their Altair 8800. So he wrote the loader in assembly on paper and spent the entire flight executing the code over and over in his head.

[@robertsmith2956]

emulators don't work for machine language. I remember trying to help a kid, and I told them just write it to this register, and your good to go. Seems the emulator does not let you write to the machine registers and make system calls. Emulators don't' handle magnetic field shifts on the platter of spinning disks. Found a great idea for a phone app to fill a needed nitch, and dammit, the iphone emulator will not let you use the camera so couldn't even get an alpha version out for testing on them. The funniest thing I ever saw was Object Oriented Assembly Language book. LOL

[@scottlarson1548]

@@robertsmith2956 So Microsoft BASIC for the 8080 never worked because it was written on an emulator?

[@robertsmith2956]

@@scottlarson1548 It didn't. You just never noticed. But it could have been the DOS under it.

[@scottlarson1548]

@@robertsmith2956 OK troll.

[@robertsmith2956]

@@scottlarson1548 I guess you never tried to interface with a plotter on yours.

[@Jim-be8sj]

Fantastic case study that highlights the fundamental tragedy of our times: computers do exactly what we tell them to do, not what we want them to do.

[@Jimmeh_B]

Exactly. That's why I prefer machines over people. Most of the time.

[@mikebarushok5361]

That's why everyone needs to discover the undocumented DWIM instruction when writing system hardware code.

[@monad_tcp]

that's why they're useful, and AI is useless, AI don't do what you tell it to do

[@mysock351C]

All too relatable lol. Had that happen when writing code for my PC to access hardware when most of my experience was with code and assembly on older Motorola MCUs like the 68HC11 and 68000 and forgetting at one point that the x86’s are little-endian. Must have wasted several hours trying to figure out why the PC seems to have dyslexia when it tries to read in the data. Worst part is the error was right in plain sight, but was “invisible” due to the ingrained bias for seeing big-endian.

[@berndeckenfels]

That’s one happy fellow

[@jwhite5008]

Novice software dev: I wasted 24h on stupid mistake, oh no, I'm so dumb! Experienced dev: I wasted 24h on stupid mistake, haha, business as usual... (yes I've done it) Many thanks for the discord crew, you are truly awesome! David, even if you don't succeed yourself (and you are better than you think you are), your enthusiasm alone is enough to keep everything going. Definitely not tired of the Centurion, wish you updated us more often on it!

[@rickhole]

Right on! You have nailed it.

[@ernestcline2868]

24h = 44o

[@clonkex]

​@@ernestcline2868😑

[@filefly]

@@ernestcline2868 lol this is amazing

[@lasskinn474]

a lot of it is just not giving up - with caveat of that you're not trying to do something logically impossible, in which case not giving up gets problematic.

[@DavidLightman]

sooo you just wrote, a low lever format utility, machine language obviously, for an ancient usupported not longer existing drive, on a discontinued, no information, obscure microcode computer from 40 years ago, and expecting to be easy?, man the fact that you made it work it is amazing!, the level of understanding that you need to solve something like that, holy cow, you rock.

[@hicknopunk]

You make it sound easy 😂

[@jnharton]

He's got a lot more knowledge and experience than those of us who had barely even heard of the machine before seeing his videos. And once you know how to accomplish on a computer something it can seem easy until you actually sit down to write some code. Of course, as seen at ~ 7:41 sometimes your beautifully written program turns out to not work as intended...

[@the_kombinator]

I would have used AI ;)

[@c128stuff]

@@the_kombinator ai won't produce anything meaningfull in a case like this.

[@the_kombinator]

@@c128stuff How would it not? Prompt it with a specific domain, feed it examples of assembly language, let it create code.

[@adailyllama4786]

Assembly taught me one critical thing many years ago - patience.

[@cathrynm]

I wouldn't be suprised if the original programmer of the lost format utility was given 9+ days to code it. It's not hard if you just accept it's going to take time. (And easier maybe if you're being paid salary and don't depend on publishing a video to get paid.)

[@cathrynm]

And yeah, watched to the end -- this is 'just programming', how it goes.

[@EkiToji]

@@cathrynm Assembly is one of those things that is easier when you have a full understanding of the hardware. Each command directly translates into opcode for the processor so you're literally telling it what you want to do step by step instead of having a higher level language's compiler do all the dirty work for you. It does however mean you need an excellent understanding to do things efficiently but if you do there's really no beating it. I for one personally miss the days I spent programming on AVR's instruction set with the 8-bit Atmel chips and directly dealing with all the registers and the ALU.

[@robertsmith2956]

@@EkiToji Amazing how much faster the atmel registers worked when you accessed them with assembly instead of using the compiler to code it. I used to drive my professors nuts. Everyone would have sheets of code, mine would be a dozen lines. Helped having the system manuals for the main frame. All 12 feet of them.

[@EkiToji]

@@robertsmith2956 Modern compilers can be pretty impressive though. I think the days are fully gone when you have to worry about individual clock cycles for if you should do a bit shift or an add for example.

[@marcwolf60]

No.. I love the Mini Centurion. But please start the Bendix SOON!!!

[@UsagiElectric]

Soon! Lloyd's foot is nearly healed, and he's been such an instrumental help behind the scenes, I can't in good conscious bring DC up for the first time without him here to witness it. As soon as he's back to 100%, we'll get him down here and push that big green button!

[@BR0KK85]

Same came to write that ! The time spent on these old thinks is never wasted and well spend!

[@Frisco1355]

Yes, this

[@Dinnye01]

That's fair enough! We can wait!​@@UsagiElectric

[@senilyDeluxe]

Bendix, Bendix, just a little bit and take it easy, show you're liking it... say Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich

[@KarlAdamsAudio]

You get some idea of the effort involved from the intensity of the celebration. When 'my code does exactly what I intended it to' is such a sweet victory, you know that the damn thing really put up a fight in the meantime.

[@ericlundquist7429]

Congratulations! Excellent work! Kudos to you and the team! It's so amazing watching you all bring these old systems back to life!

[@UsagiElectric]

Thanks Eric! Hopefully, my assembly wasn't too painful to look at, haha.

[@Jimmeh_B]

@@UsagiElectric Ha! Of course it was! When is assembly not painful to look at? Brings back (good) memories of 8 yr old me banging my head against dad's Sanyo MBC1000 while teaching myself CPM. Excellent video Mr. Usagi!!!

[@brianh.4185]

Listening to this brings me back to my uni days when I co-oped with a major manufacturer and met Jack Bush. Jack spoke assembly like his primary language. He would make the PDPs dance. I never was able to figure out if he was a genius or just plain mad.

[@adamthethird4753]

“It’s remarkable how often those two traits coincide” - Cpt. Jack Sparrow

[@c128stuff]

"I never was able to figure out if he was a genius or just plain mad." There is more than a bit of overlap between those 2 things...

[@tezinho81]

True geniuses see and interpret the world in a different way to most of us... Which can be indistinguishable from madness for some.

[@robertsmith2956]

@@tezinho81 I have never been able to understand humans. They are BSOD'S to me.

[@YoutubeBorkedMyOldHandle_why]

Exactly! Assembly is like that. I recall a similar experience some 40 years ago while working on a Z80 program. For a couple of weeks everything had been going just great. Then, I made an absolutely trivial change ... and the program crashed, over and over and over again. Long story short, I stared it down for probably 18 hours, trying 'Everything' until it finally clicked. Some recently added text data had clobbered some executable code. Today, this would be trivial, in fact the very first think I'd check ... but that's how you learn man. I've maintained since then, that you can never be a real assembly programmer, until you've spent 18 hours in a row staring at the screen, looking for that one tiny tiny little detail that you thought you understood, but somehow missed.

[@hicknopunk]

This is why I am not a real programmer 😅

[@robertsmith2956]

hackers tried to change an equivalent test command to a set command in linux kernal code once. changed an == to := in the source tree.

[@ryanmccampbell7]

You're way too humble, most modern SWE's even in big tech companies can barely read x86 asm let alone write it, meanwhile you're writing full programs in an assembly language that if I recall was reverse engineered from scratch.

[@genius1a]

And let us not forget: That was absolutely cutting edge technology and programming back then - the only real advantage we have today is imminent worldwide communication and myriads of information floating around. But you still have to UNDERSTAND it as our ancestors had to master it. Absolutely stunning how you were able to revive this complex machine!

[@joeofloath]

To be fair, X86 assembly is probably the worst and least readable of all assembly languages. This reads more like modern(ish) microcontroller assembly, which is more readable but still absolutely wild if you've never touched bare metal before.

[@ryanmccampbell7]

@@joeofloath I think the "core" of x86 isn't that complicated or different from other languages, it's just that they've kept adding new and more esoteric instructions over the last 40 years or so and you need to decipher all those random nonsense abbreviations.

[@KR4FTW3RK]

@@genius1a pretty much every modern language is somewhat readable... this shit? Might aswell be staring at hieroglyphics

[@genius1a]

@@KR4FTW3RK making readable programming languages was never the problem... It's about thinking of every single register operation and keeping a low character number for memory restrictions. There's a reason why assembly is lightning fast in comparison to C++ or basic. These readable ways of telling the computer what it should execute has to go through multiple stages of automated interpretation to the level of being almost like assembly with loads of generalizations and unnecessary ballast to make it possible. I feel that some of that will be solvable by AI translation, but our youth has no incentive to do programming at all, as everything you could possibly need in your happy life gets catered by the electronics and media industry nice and easy. Politicians and teachers don't see the long term impact for society. Usagi is one of the few showing, what can be done and achieved long term if you put in decent effort on something that seems unbearable at first glance.

[@stephenhill4492]

It’s always obvious after you’ve spotted it. Well done in solving such an insanely difficult problem.

[@horusfalcon]

Yup. What you're hunting for is always in the last place you look. 😆

[@mikebarushok5361]

I'm having a very bad day (medical issues). This video is just what I needed. It's always a little bit easier knowing that when everything is getting frustrating and you can't see the way forward that somebody, somewhere has found a way through. Thanks!

[@UsagiElectric]

I'm sorry to hear that it's been a rough day. If there's one thing I've learned working on computers, it's to never give up. Tenacity and stubbornness will often get you through, so don't quit, as long as your gulping down air, you're still in it and I know you can make it to the other side!

[@rickhole]

@@UsagiElectric I have found many times that a short break to clear the mind works wonders. How many times I have left the room for a break and the anwer pops into my mind just after I move the flush lever! Really.

[@hicknopunk]

I hope you are doing okay buddy 🤗

[@SimonBauer7]

hope you get better!

[@colindevaux4476]

never seen one of these machines and most likely never will. but what i love about all your videos is your enthusiasm and excitement. and the add bonus of bunnies :)

[@UsagiElectric]

Thank you so much! Be honest though, it's mostly the bunnies :P

[@colindevaux4476]

@@UsagiElectric yep. you got me :)

[@Enjoymentboy]

I remember so clearly about 30 years ago when I was in my second semester of computer engineering and Wednesday nights was my assembler class. I've never gotten the hang of coding and assembler was worse than I had imagined. But I pushed though and on the 6th class I went in feeling really good about things as they were finally making sense. Our instructor was a grizzled old russian guy and pretty much EXACLTY what you'd expect from your mental image of a 60 year old soviet hacker with a super thick accent. I got to class, sat down with my assignment and he walked in. he went up the board and started writing things that literally meant nothing to me. Push AX, Pop B...nonsense like that. Everyone was writing stuff down and I was positive he wasn't even speaking english. I turned to my buddy Grant and asked if he had any idea what the guy was talking about and he looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked "Didn't you do your assignment?". I looked at my notes and then back at Grant and said "I thought I did". It was at that moment that I knew that programming was not for me. I packed up and walked out. The instructor asked where I was going and I told him as far away from programming as I possibly could get and the next morning I switched to electronics engineering to see that I had C+ first thing that morning.

[@dazealex]

Software Engineer here... Have done a lot of code dealing with boot sectors, etc., but never, ever wrote or thought of writing my own low level formatter! Good job, Usagi!

Steve Gibson did it pre www.

[@ultraviolettp3446]

I can only speak for myself, but considering that there is likely no other youtuber who would dare to work on a system like this, I don't see an issue with you spending time to do this series to get it working. I went to college starting in 1980 and remember having to book computer time in the lab to run my Fortran projects. While I no longer remember what hardware I was using, I do appreciate vintage computer systems and this makes me appreciate where we are now with systems. Keep up the great work - and most importantly, never lose that "geeky and nerdy" enthusiasm that you show in each episode. I appreciate you from the Commonwealth of Virginia! Kudos!

[@rickhole]

In the 60s-80s and presumably before (but that was before my experience), one was not REALLY a programmer until he or she has written and debugged in Assembly. So, Dave, you are HEREBY granted the rank of ENTERED APPRENTICE GURU of Centurion Programming. I predict you will climb the ranks to Master Guru soon!

[@skilz8098]

At one time Assembly was for amateurs especially when your program was on set of punch cards. And back then, the standard size of a byte that we know and love today being 8 bits, wasn't always 8 bits. And at one time, those punch cards were for amateurs. The generation before them had to plug and unplug wires into specific ports to program the old vacuum tube computers and before that, the old relay computers. I think it'd be fun to watch some of these modern web dev script kiddies try to setup and program a textile loom from the late 1800s, early 1900s without any videos, without any internet and the only thing available to them would be the loom itself and the user manual. Now that would make for an entertaining experience for others to observe.

[@robertsmith2956]

@@skilz8098 Ahh the memory cards. rows and columns of magnets strung together with fine copper wire. Think the wildest thing I saw was a printer with a head the size of the paper so it printed the entire page with on strike. Then tractor fed the next sheet into place. It was fast. My bucket list is building a arduino optical reader to read ticker tape, and punch cards so I can read some old programs I still have. The tape I wouldn't trust to hold up with a pin reader.

[@skilz8098]

@@robertsmith2956 Nice! Yeah, not even the loom from my example, but how about the print press itself as you kind of inferred towards with the printing of a single page. Many of them have no idea about the origins of type setting. Yet that's still sort of another example of programming.

[@TheMarkRich]

I cut my programming teeth on 6500 and 8088/8086 assembly. I feel your pain. But that warm fuzzy feeling inside when the logic makes sense and the program works is soooooo good. 😃

[@martinrayner6466]

_As a software developer of over 40years experience. Started assembly/machine code on a commodore PET. It's not about being smart, or dumb. Its all about being methodical and unrelenting. _*_Well done._*

[@brooksmatthewjohn]

You have such infectious enthusiasm, it's always a joy to watch your videos.

[@antonnym214]

I am NOT sick of the Centurion. This is great stuff! Thank you for presenting this.

[@lorensims4846]

Assembly Programming is hard, but back in the day it was often the only way to do it, for reasons. But you have to be perfect and have complete knowledge of the machine you are trying to program. This is why we were so excited to finally get BASIC and Forth or anything that might be able to abstract away some of those gritty details that kept tripping us up. I remember a review in Creative Computing of an 8" floppy drive for S-100 systems that seemed to perform well but there was a bug in the disk format command. The drive could happily format a paper plate and report success, so readers were warned about that. Reads and writes seemed to be fine, but you might want to buy preformatted floppies or format them on a different machine.

[@toby9999]

I built an S-100 system back late 70s. Hand assembled and soldered boards. There was no assembler. Everything was hex and hand calculated etc. Tedious, but a fun challenge at that time. I even wrote my own machine code monitor debugger in machine code because the only thing available was rather limited.

[@mikefochtman7164]

Don't kick yourself too much for taking longer than your friend to deal with assembler. Like your friend, I've done assembler on a wide number of architectures dating back to Z80 and the obscure 6510. From that I've done several 'mini' systems and it gets easier with each one. So the fact that this is probably your first CPU assembly and your friends umpteenth means you've nothing to feel bad about. Not to mention all the different support boards/ features. MMIO board is certainly different than the 'class E' I/O boards I worked with in SEL systems, but good documentation and some samples can be great tools to learn from.

[@Bata.andrei]

Inever could get my head aroung learning C++ or other high level programming languages, but for some reason, assembly made sense to me from day one. I don't speak assembly as my native tongue, but the more i use it, the easier it becomes

[@Jimmeh_B]

I think that depends on whether or not you actually understand architecture. I agree. I gave up on C many many moons ago. I learned Pascal 6 and 7 during high school and it was a struggle. I cut my teeth when I was 8 years old when I taught myself CPM on a Z80. Or maybe it was just that I had a younger mind that made it seem easier? Either way, it just made sense to me.

[@Bata.andrei]

@@Jimmeh_B I think assembler comes easier to me because I am a hardware guy primarily and i like to get to know what my system does at low level.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@Bata.andreisame. I mostly engage physically, with hardware, and I gave up on Python or C. But assembly clicked right away; memory addresses encoding literal combinations of output pins on the CPU, putting stuff in and out of registers, bits as bits and your job to make sense of it… was all the kind of stuff I was already familiar with with buttons and logic gates.

[@inmbolmie1853]

The days when men were men and wrote their own low-level formatting tools are back!

[@howwitty]

I think people who code in higher level languages like C should have a healthy respect for machine code and I am slightly suspicious of their motivations if they don't.

[@lauram5905]

​@@howwitty modern web coders are fascinating people who think it's okay to have a 2MB library (repeatedly downloaded and cached) running visual effects for 50kb of webpage text, and somehow using 200MB of client RAM

[@ahmad-murery]

@@lauram5905 This is what always bothers me, they don't consider the performance and resource limits, it's OK for them as long as it woks on their own devices

[@scottlarson1548]

@@lauram5905 Try doing that in assembly code.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@lauram5905lmao yep. Reading one page of KZbin comments (CPU-bound JS code) uses as much battery power as 20 minutes of HD video (hardware accelerated codec) on my laptop. It’s a ridiculous statistic!

[@povilasstaniulis9484]

Congrats on your success ! As a developer myself I can say one thing: it's not just you. I had frustrating moments like this more times than I can count. Times when I was looking at a piece of code which looked totally correct to me but still did not work. And in most of these cases, it turned out the fault was something really simple. As simple as a one or two-line fix. Those "simple" faults usually take the most time to find.

[@c128stuff]

Haha, no, not getting tired of seeing mini centurion stuff, it is a fun and interesting project.

[@computer_toucher]

This is so awesome, getting into the nitty gritty of these old things. And I love your enthusiasm and emotional outbursts when things go either right or wrong. So glad I discovered your channel back when I did :)

[@TimGreenOwb]

I feel your pain. I once spent days beating my head against the wall only to finally figure out the BC register pair doesn't affect the Zero flag.

[@big0bad0brad]

That's about as good as PICASM having an active high carry flag but an active low borrow flag

[@MatroxMillennium]

Woohoo! Very excited to see you at VCFSW (this will be my first VCF attendance)

[@UsagiElectric]

Heck yeah, see you in a week!

[@jaut-76]

I love and hate assembly programming but slowly getting better at it. Helps when you have original manuals that explain it well

[@byteforever7829]

Yes assembly programming is harder sometimes but once you get in the groove it gets easier😃

[@spacewolfjr]

Madonna has a great song about getting into the groove and programming in assembly

[@LawrenceFoster-i7j]

Plus there are libraries of machine language functions, so it does get easier with experience and knowledge. It never gets *easy* though. It really makes more sense to use C or its equivalent in terms of productivity for low level code, but this is more like fun problem solving not paid work.

[@RobSchofield]

@ 14:50 - the true "All-nighter High" - the giggles usually come next, followed by the munchies 😀

[@baronvonschnellenstein2811]

Well done Usagi! Now, you've learned some assembly "the best way" (e.g., the hard way). You haven't been learning assembly properly unless at some point you write and execute code that ends up "pointing up its own backside". I expect you now have some direct perspective as to why the chaps at Bell Labs implemented the C language, with which to write Unix, but without going bonkers in the process! :p Also, regardless of the language - quite often it takes a second pair of eyes (or sleeping on it) to spot an issue when ones self has been staring at the same code for hours on end.

[@larryroyovitz7829]

Usagi, if YOU'RE dumb, then I'm a single celled organism! 😃

[@OtherWorldExplorers]

When passion almost becomes work.

[@KameraShy]

The more difficult and complex the program, the more time you need to take to step back and clear your head. The most effective problem solving technique: a good night's sleep.

[@antonnym214]

I can sympathize. Back in the 80s, I worked on an Altos system in MPM II and had to write my own file copy, file print, and file search commands.

[@anidnmeno]

7:25 every time i'm like "let me handle this issue _right quick_ "

[@curiousorange27]

you're energy and passion actually makes assembly fun to watch! Keep it up - cheers

[@richardhole8429]

This was among the most exciting episodes on the internet, from any content provider. They say, no pain. No gain. You had both.

[@HugoJosePinto]

By all means keep the Centurion episodes coming! Those are insanely fun, and besides I’m using you as in inspiration for similar work in restoring a Data General oddity myself and I’ve learned TONS with your videos!

[@algorithminc.8850]

A friend told to me ages ago, "You can burn out on the things you love doing." I chuckled, when you effectively said it. Creating very "high tech" daily - I relax by working on "old tech" (1920's/30's radios, 40's TV's, 70's/80's computers). There are many brilliant ideas forgotten in the old tech and thoughts to spark. Sometimes old-tech efforts become as laborious as production work and no longer a hobby. What you've done there is quite positively impressive. I think the old bits should be preserved for history. I like your tube-computer project myself. Perhaps a key is not to pile up too many projects to do at once - to focus on the bits you're really most wanting to work on at a given time. Perhaps stating the obvious. Lots of great bits on this channel. Thanks. Cheers

[@robertsmith2956]

When I bought my beetle, I was floored. Why that is so simple, why aren't they still making cars this way. Hate not being a drunk. Would love to watch them try and hook an immobilizer to one. Now i'm learning to program fuel injector control for a project. Back to hardware and software integration as the world use to be. With their pulse guns, TUUBES may once again be king.

[@exidy-yt]

Dave, your eyes looked like two pissholes in a snowbank before you did your final attempt at formatting the fixed platter. I was SO stoked for you to get it finally working, you needed some restful sleep and I know you would have slept like crap if you had to go to bed on a fail after all that. Congrats! And no worries, I can never get sick of Centurion content, it's what brought me here after all!

[@jasnic2131]

Congratulations to you Dave, tremendous effort! Trust me when I say, I know how it feels to be stuck with something that doesn't work when you know it should, you spend so much of your life (hours or even days) trying different things and boom, it works! That is the best feeling of them all. Keep up the good work!

[@wtmayhew]

Superb job! Thanks so much for sharing your journey getting the hawk fixed platter back.

[@SergeiJonovich]

result - your perseverance on this is inspiring. Congrats on beating that thing!

[@EmperorKonstantine01]

Just getting this machine up and running on first base was a milestone, this is further progress. Well Done!

[@Derpy1969]

I enjoy seeing you accomplish your goals. It’s truly fun to see you succeed.

[@billchatfield3064]

I love the fade to black and white with the sad music. Haha. That really captures that feeling when your code doesn't work.

[@wa4aos]

CONGRATS !!! Your enthusiasm at success was understandable and appreciated. Good for you !!!!

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

I love your never give up attitude and enthusiasm. Great job!

[@jeromethiel4323]

Assembler is better than coding in machine code. I've done that, and that's another level of crazy. Because i didn't have an assembler, i had to hand compile code. Granted it was only 6502, which isn't an instruction rich processor, but still. My saving grace was when i ran across a magazine article talking about the apple integer basic having a mini-assembler, and how to copy that code out into floating point land. It wasn't great, but it was better than doing it by hand.

[@foxyfoxington2651]

As soon as I saw "Assembly Programming" I knew you were entering into "You​'​re Gonna Learn a Lesson in This Delicatessen" territory.

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

Wow, how exciting that you got all that fixed (except maybe one negligible track or something like that)! Good work by not only you but your helpers!

[@SjoerdBeukers]

"Either it went perfectly, or it failed dramatically. Regardless, I Quit." Brilliant!🤣

[@3vi1J]

Congrats! Way to push through when the going gets tough!

[@TarakuT]

assembly is so hard! lol.. I feel you on this. good luck man. also I would see if you can find small projects that you can do on the side in 1 video to both help keep you from burning out, as well as give you the feeling of accomplishment fixing small things. Just a thought

[@Lemonsieur-m4m]

I'm a 60 years old computer engineer and can certify this man is crazy.

[@BladSG]

i-am-losing-my-mind... this was so exciting and cool, really glad you didnt give up and made it, the relief of success was great to see

[@stevecrankorganguy804]

I always preferred assembly language programming for the 6502. I got to the point I could not do basic, but did the program in assembly just fine. Over the years I did many reams of assembly and had a great time doing it! I even wrote a DOS for MFM and again for SCSI. That was a challenge! Thanks for the great video! Steve

[@MarcelHuguenin]

Congratulations David and TeamCenturion! Wonderful achievement and great video!

[@jimrhea5484]

Never in my wildest dreams would I thought I would ever see the old man at the end of Tron standing on a 2024 F1 track.

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

"How come it only did one sector?" Haha, I loved the little dramatic sequence there.

[@frankowalker4662]

That's brilliant. Great result from you and your helpers. 👍

[@paulalmquist5683]

Well done. Perseverance pays off. I have spent some long hours on bugs too. That feeling when success finally come is amazing.

[@connclissmann6514]

Thanks for this and congratulations on booting on the fixed platter.

[@esra_erimez]

8:16 I can't tell you the number of times in my life that I have been in this situation and felt this way. I truly feel for you.

[@antonnym214]

My man! congrats. Nice job on the format command. Now you can enjoy your trip. This time of year, Dubai has similar daytime highs to what we have here in New Mexico (105°). Stay cool!

[@LawrenceFoster-i7j]

The joyous enthusiasm is addictive - subscribed

[@Davide0033]

having a bad day but this video made it a lot better. i love the centurion and trubleshooting, but also the memes are top notch

[@irisastravortex]

I love to follow the slow & long journey and see the gradual progress 😊

[@subynut]

It is so frustrating when a "simple" bug in the code keeps things from working right! Glad you and your army of developers figured it out and got it working!

[@ahmad-murery]

9:37 David will not sell his happiness to anyone. If you consider yourself dumb, wait to see me

[@Lord-Sméagol]

Great bare metal assembly coding! This reminds me of experimenting with the track format command [WD1797] in 1985, squashing the preamble and inter-sector gaps enough to fit an 11th 512 byte sector in (and over-stroking to 83 tracks) to reliably increase my Nascom 2 CP/M floppy free space from 786K to 898K.

[@Lord-Sméagol]

I did a lot of Z80 on my Nascom 2. If the program is small, I don't even need an assembler (or disassembler); I know Z80 in hex! When programming on my PC, I find the C x86/x64 intrinsics make most things possible (SIMD, AVX), but I still need the extra control that assembly coding provides to do optimizations that the C compiler can't manage. Sometimes, assembly coding is the only way to ge the job done!

[@VICTORGUNNOE]

I was rejoicing and cried tears of joy with you on seeing all your hard work and effort scroll up that screen with a successful result! Keep up the good work!

[@erniecamhan]

Well done lad 👍🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[@lindoran]

Its a wonderful feeling when everything pays out!! Fantastic 😊😊

[@GothGuy885]

Awesome work Guys! glad that you got the problem fixed, Usagi, you know alot more then I do about Assembly Language, which in my case it not much at all to Zero, when it comes down to the blood and guts of it. thanks for the Video !, I always totally enjoy your content😀

[@markrosenthal9108]

It's not so much assembly language per se that's hard. It's directly programming the iron. Hardware protocols, command and status bitmaps, timing, interrupt service routines... Fun!

[@mikafoxx2717]

Yeep, for assembly you have control of everything, with zero translation later to help you out. You need to know the machine inside and out to use it

[@fglatzel]

This takes me back memory lane, when I started as an assembly programmer in the 80s in Germany. Forty years later, it's hard to imagine a life without C++ and Python.

[@Plarndude]

Wow! Congratulations! I felt completely lost looking at assembly code. My brain just hurts now.

[@ericsteel173]

The first time I took Assembler in college, the class was at night, 7:00 - 9:40 pm. That was bad enough. But the instructor was an old school IBM veteran, from Selma, AL. He had a deep, sonorous voice and talked very s-l-o-w-l-y. I was always zoned out by 7:10 pm.

[@Bora1333]

Amazing Love seeing you so happy ❤

[@alanjhargreaves]

Love your excitement.

[@GoldenLion8]

Mini Centurion is what got me started with this channel! I hardly understand the technical details, but those first videos until the first word in the Usagi-Centurion world was uttered ("Hellorld") where absolutely captivating.

[@LS-jv4uh]

The joy and the pain. It’s beautiful.

[@sutorippuwebmaster8783]

Alright, alright, I subbed. You didn't need to keep showing me old computer sorcery I could never master. (But do keep at that. This stuff's nifty.)

[@bronka42]

the two most beautiful words in any language... No errors

[@dactimis3625]

For me is easy and interesting. And I performed machine language programming too. I consider that to know the computers machine languages is an act of kindness.

[@alienmachine]

@2:18 This is hilarious, but true, having programmed in assembly for years.😂😂

[@mistermac56]

I understand your frustration, but when you worked with the people helping you out, you gained some valuable knowledge. It makes success so much more rewarding. This video brings back college memories of my EDP classes in the 80's with IBM 370 assembler. I was struggling right out of the gate and became so frustrated, I was almost at the point of dropping out of an EDP major. I went to my professor, who knew IBM 370 assembly language inside and out and told him I was thinking about changing my major, and he gave me a great piece of advice. Stop trying to think how to code in higher level language, like RPG and COBOL. It was a struggle at first, but I finally "got it" and frustration disappeared and confidence was built. When I moved on to the IBM 370 Job Control Language class, I had extremely few problems.

[@peterlemon1385]

Glad you managed to sort that problem out. I hope the emulator you 1st tested on, which ran you old incorrect code fine, can be fixed to better represent the same fault with your old code, to make the emulator more accurate & possibly help other people trying to do similar stuff in the future, testing on that emulator =D

[@jonathanhernandez4304]

It's good to be dumb and yet master what a pro can do. Who cares how long it took. The accomplishments taste great and I share in your excitement. I learned my career in Manufacturing Engineering at the slowest pace. But 30 years into it I can safely say, I'm good at what I do. Now I'm learning STM32 boards and more. You are motivating others...good work man!

[@rudycandu1633]

In 1982 I was in my second year taking Electronic Technology course at a community college. One of the classes was a microprocessor course. We needed to do a project, wire up the electronics and write the code in assembly language for the Z80. My project was to make a floppy disk controller for the S100 bus, write the code in assembly language, and to read a file on the 8 inch disk. (CP/M operating system) I found a LSI chip that was available. Made a schematic. Then wire wrapped the circuit board. Wrote the code. But it didn't work. I went over everything. Using a two channel scope I check all the timing signals. Everything was correct. In the end I figured it had to be a bad 40 pin wire-wrap socket used for the floppy controller chip. I wired a second socket in parallel, moved the chip, ran my original code. The file was displayed on the console. *Eureka Rudy It works* I enjoyed everything about that course, including writing the code in assembly language. I had no idea that I would have a career designing microprocessor/microcontroller based products. (retired two years ago)

[@mbeware]

you have so many projects and they are so interesting, that I don't mind many weeks about the same project, because I know that eventually, I'll have a new video on those other projects. I don't think you abandoned projects without explaining. you changed direction or adapted. Combined with your great story telling, it makes for great video. Sometimes, I imagine the technical documentation that you translate, being in the same style with turn, twist and surprises. that would make an interesting manual.;-)

[@cerberes]

Your joy brings us nerds joy! Congrats on your success.