[jacquesm]

It's nonsense, elite was written in assembler. Nobody but masochists were programming directly in hex. The only time I've done it was because there was a quick hack to be done on an apple II and I knew most of the opcodes by heart and how to compute branches. (And the reason for that is that I'd written an assembler). So unless you had no tools you really did not have to program by poking bytes into memory directly. Apropos, BBC basic came with an assembler built in triggered by the [ character.

[gillianseed]

Yes, although back in my c64 programming days I knew the 6510 opcodes by heart, one didn't actually program by using machine code.

You used an assembler (turbo assembler, those were the days).

assembly: lda #00, sta $d021, sta $d020,

generated machine code: a9 00, 8d 21 d0, 8d 20 d0

Anyone else remember what this would do on the c64? :)