I found the z80 delightful to work with, especially in comparison with the 6502 because it had twice as many registers and you could switch banks of them on the z80.
you have to love programming to really appreciate assembly, the succinctness, the satisfaction of being so close to the metal, none of this high level peek and poke nonsense of high level languages :)
you don't write code using a hex dump???
You write assembly code using either hand assembly or more efficiently using a tool called an assembler which makes the tedious task of mapping instructions by name to their hex values easier. After a while you get to remember the common ones though, C9 for example.
Yep, I can remember doing that on a CBM 3016 in secondary school - must have been about 1979. A little later this 'thing' arrived that comprised a keyboard in a large, plain grey case with a micro-cassette drive, permanently hooked up to a domestic TV by a large umbilical cord. A group of us were given some information booklets and told to 'see what we could do with it'. We later found out it was a prototype for the BBC micro and further code updates allowed us to select teletext pages on the TV and go to 'special' pages that downloaded code to the micro-cassette. We wrote a lot of simple games and apps for the beast.
you have to love programming to really appreciate assembly, the succinctness, the satisfaction of being so close to the metal, none of this high level peek and poke nonsense of high level languages :)
you don't write code using a hex dump???
You write assembly code using either hand assembly or more efficiently using a tool called an assembler which makes the tedious task of mapping instructions by name to their hex values easier. After a while you get to remember the common ones though, C9 for example.
And I haven't heard of your school buddy, sorry.