I've had a goal for the past three years to learn Assembly language. This December, I finally put some real effort into learning the language. I followed the tutorials in Oscar Toledo G's "Programming Boot Sector Games" and used Gemini as a tutor to help explain the concepts I was stuck on. It was tempting at points to vibe code some of the trickiest pieces, but I found resisting the temptation and using Gemini just to be an expert tutor to answer my ignorant questions brought back the joy of coding again. The result is a Christmas-themed Space Invaders clone written in 8086 Assembly.

The code isn't perfect, and neither are my line-by-line comments, but it's a good exercise if anyone else is trying to learn a language.

The game compiles to a .com file and runs in DOSBox. I'm not trying to fit it into a boot sector (512 bytes) like the original tutorial (https://github.com/nanochess/Invaders/blob/master/invaders.a...), so my code assembles to more verbose (around 700 bytes).