sergey
Veteran Member
A few people have stated that machine code which is directly executed on the CPU is not visible by the user
I am not sure if this is true but do early computers have an exception to this?
I am not too clear on this area, things like .bin files have viewable mechine code right (in hex)?
Is this different to what is executed on the machine?
If theoretically you were able to write in machine code would you be able to pump it into the processor without a compiler/assembler?
You mean visible like Blinkenlights?
With x86 (and other newer processors) people won't normally program computer directly with machine codes, and also users won't normally see machine codes, unless they run a debugger or look at the HEX dump of an executable file. But still if you want, you can program it with machine codes either by creating .COM file using your favorite HEX editor or just with DOS debug. It might be a good thing to try, especially if you want to understand how x86 instructions are encoded (see pages 29-36 here). But probably it is not very useful for any serious programming. x86 have somehow complex instruction format, and with an assembler you'll be able to do exactly the same (same granularity of low-level CPU control), with much less effort.