Recommend the best possible book for programming ASM's 65816

Hello...

I'm new here, and i've come here specifically to learn all about the snes... i'm from spain, so i can't expressing myself in english so well than a native. Sorry about that.

I've been spending a while searching along the forum about some info for recommended books for programming the 65816, but the only thing i reached to know, is that the one written by david eyes there in the nineties were the reference then... and therefore surely is a really good one, but i don't know if maybe there is some other that can be more complete.

It hasn't seemed to me to see a topic treating specifically for this kind of question, so i decided to open it. As i already said, i didn't see nothing using the search... sorry for the inconvenience in all case.


Can someone recommend the better book to programming the 65c816, appart of the one of david eye's? (name, author, date of edition, etc).


Thanks in advance... ^^

Hi!


For me, the de facto reference for programming the 65816 is indeed Eyes & Lichty's Programming the 65816. I read through it several times, and it answered close to 100% of the questions I had when I started out. As a cross-reference, I use a book of the exact same name (i.e., Programming the 65816) by a person named William Labiak. Google it, you can't miss it. Both of these publications are highly recommended.

Hope this helps!
Ramsis

The Eyes/Lichty book is still **the** go-to for the processor. However, as you know, finding a paper copy is virtually impossible (I still have mine that I got back in the super late 80s). Western Design Center has since bought the rights to the book and so they own it and release PDFs/their own version since.

There are digital versions here that I put up some time ago: http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Prog ... ide#Online

But as I've mentioned in the past, there are mistakes (OCR-related) with at least one of the PDFs there. I contacted WDC about it, and Bill Mensch himself responded agreeing that the quality was sub-par and they would be rectifying it (and they did; but the fixed version isn't available unless you buy it, which I have not).

Otherwise if you want something "better and awesome and I-can't-accept-these-answers", contact WDC. They can/will sell you a copy of their book.

Is this the book?, i think that amazon sells it, and at good price...

http://images.delcampe.com/img_large/au ... 01.jpg?v=1



That is the book you mean that has mistakes?.


Edit: Thank you to both two

I guess I'll have to repeat myself and explain in more detail.

1. That picture is of the Eyes/Lichty book cover, yes.

2. No; the "book with mistakes" is a PDF from WDC where they OCR'd the Eyes/Lichty book and did some mangling of lots of things. The PDF has mistakes in it. This is what I talked to Bill Mensch about. Proof of that is this post of mine here: viewtopic.php?p=142722#p142722

3. There are several versions of the PDFs from WDC, all are different. I happen to have a PDF that is a legitimate and very well-done scan of the Eyes/Lichty book, which includes searchable (and copy-able) text. It's a very large PDF (about 55MBytes) since all the pages are images (except for the fact that OCR was applied to the text so you can search and/or copy it. The PDF format offers this type of capability). Compare that to a "pure (non-image) PDF" version that comes from WDC: 1.7MBytes.

4. WDC owns the rights to the Eyes/Lichty book. The official website for it is here. They began producing forms of it again very recently (this year), including offering Kindle versions. You'll find ways to purchase it on that site (they sell it on Amazon, for example). I do not know what the quality of this version is, however, as I do not have a copy of it to compare to the original Eyes/Lichty version from 1986.

Here is a link to William Labiak's book.
http://www.romhacking.net/documents/616/

Thank you koitsu, clear like crystal

Finally i bought it from here:
https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/089303 ... UTF8&psc=1

Is new, and with a coherent price. Luckily has been reedited, if not, it could had the same destiny than other books, costing some hundreds dollars.




Ramsis also putted a link too, but i was searching for a paper book.

Always is better ^^


Thank you, man.

The Kindle version is 42 MBytes. Where were the mistakes you spotted, so I can check if this version has been corrected ?

Several of the opcodes in the instruction set chapter (chapters 18 and 19, but that might have changed?) are wrong, including some of the addressing modes. The "summarised" chart at the end is of extremely bad quality (looks like a low-DPI scan, hard to read), and several other areas. I did not write down what was wrong, but there were at least 3 or 4 separate mistakes I found while simply using the PDF (which I compared to the original 80s book and found them to be correct there, i.e. OCR mistakes or manual editing mistakes). Per Bill Mensch himself:


I'm not sure I'd be legally allowed to put up the "original 80s" Lichty/Eyes version somewhere for download for comparison. I believe that'd be piracy, so I'd rather not do that.

I was surprised to discover that some minor errors, like using the letter O instead of a zero in code fragments, are apparently even present in the original.

Examples:

This is a section from p. 95 of WDC's 1,7 MB PDF file:


For comparison, here's p. 117 from the 55 MB PDF:


You can clearly make out the difference (LDY $00FO). Funnily enough, the OCR seems to have corrected this, so if you search for $00f0 or simply mark the text in the big PDF, it'll find 4 matches on this page, or show the correct code in a sans-serif font, respectively.

Anyway, I'm going to buy the Kindle version shortly, thanks for pointing out that it exists, koitsu.