I just wanted to say thanks. NASM seems to be exactly what I need.
I've written a 600 byte machine code program directly in hex for a Motorola MCU (68705p3) a long time ago, so I've had a taste of what can be accomplished with "low level programming"
I currently write a lot of VB and a little VC++, but that won't due for my really big projects. For those, I'll need to work in Linux (64bit) with a good assembler (NASM).
So, once again, I thank you.