October 31, 2025
8 MHz and a mountain of feelings
How I stopped worrying and started loving the Assembly
Retro coding sparks a nostalgia riot as robots play DOOM and devs feud over AI
TLDR: A developer fell back in love with low-level coding on an old Atari, showing it’s doable today with emulators and modern tools. The comments split between nostalgia-fueled hype and a practical “no time, ask AI” stance, proving retro tinkering is both therapy and a lively debate on what coding should be.
Retro dev Jonas Eschenburg just declared his love for old-school assembly on the Atari ST—an ‘80s home computer—and the internet is reacting like it’s prom night for nerds. Fans cheered the throwback vibe, with indyjo turning the headline into a meme: “robots are playing DOOM now.” Agingcoder dropped a mic with “Comanche on an Atari ST”—a shout-out to flight-sim vibes—and brabel is already dusting off their childhood, fired up to try emulators like Hatari using modern tools and the Crossmint compiler. It’s retro magic without floppy disks.
Then the drama hit. jmspring came in hot with the real-world take: love the craft, but time is a myth—so it’s “ask Claude and move on” season. That split the crowd: purists swooned over bare-metal coding (writing super low-level instructions), while pragmatists said the future belongs to AI copilots. Newcomers like mrasong chimed in, grateful the piece made assembly less scary. The mood? Half nostalgic summer camp, half productivity brawl. The jokes flew—“8 MHz therapy,” “Grandpa Code,” and endless DOOM-on-robots memes—while everyone agreed on one thing: this retro romp makes tech feel fun again, and you can actually try it today with just an emulator and a weekend.
Key Points
- •The article reports on writing software for the Atari ST using modern tools and emulation.
- •The Atari ST typically features a Motorola 68000 CPU at 8 MHz, 1 MB RAM, and floppy-based software loading.
- •Graphics modes include 640×400 monochrome and a 320×200 16-color mode, with the latter popular for games.
- •Developers can use the Hatari emulator with modern tools like VSCode, GCC, binutils, and GIMP for retro projects.
- •Precompiled GNU toolchain binaries are available via Thorsten Otto’s Crossmint site, enabling a C “Hello World” build for Atari ST.