MIPS is great because it is essentially designed for learning assembly
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Does it have to be a modern architecture? Or can you learn 6502 or 68000?
nope, it doesnt, actually it might be handy to be an old one so i can test it in a emulator at 100% speed
Go with m68k then, high level, very orthogonal, with enough registers to not need tying yourself into a pretzel for most tasks.
If you get an Amiga emulator you might be able to do some more fun stuff with it, compared to emulating only a CPU. In addition, if you search for "Amiga assembly tutorial" you might find more resources than if you search for tutorials for a specific CPU.
It probably doesn’t matter too much which assembly language you learn. In some sense they’re all relatively similar. If you want to learn it for a specific purpose you should learn the language you’re hoping to use. Otherwise, RISC-V, Arm, and MIPS are all pretty nice and clean. x86 is kind of ugly and it might be a little distracting when trying to learn the basics, but it’s probably what your computer has and it’s cool to learn on your actual device.
Other possibilities… TIS-100 and Shenzhen IO are both games where you do some assembly programming. They’re somewhat artificial, but honestly they’ll give you a good introduction.
X86 / X86-64 or ARM. Mostly just due to how accessible information is on them but if I had to choose I'd go with ARM personally. Most used in smartphones, tablets, and other such devices. It has a simple and consistent instruction set, a clear and logical syntax, and a modular and scalable architecture.
Some of the x86 instructions are so complex and niche that they can be considered esoteric. So heads up: if you jump in and attempt to learn x86, then get completely overwhelmed, it's not you.
RISC-V.