Back in the day, when 8-bit processors were king, memory chips had limited storage space and were expensive. By today’s standards, software development tools were crude and limited. To get any sort of performance from a microprocessor running at less than 5 MHz, the code needed to be efficient. Therefore, programmers often had little choice but to write in assembler (using instructions that have a very strong resemblance to machine code), passing it through a linker to produce an executable hex file. In this project, we write a routine in assembler and run it on an up-to-date PIC processor, outputting a sine wave via its in-built digital-to-analog converter (DAC). This project should give you a new appreciation of all the unseen work that compilers of higher-level languages normally take care of. However, if you want the best performance from a processor and wish to see what is going on at register level, you have to work in assembler.