ASM Newbie: Delays, waiting X seconds

[uniforix]

What's the best way to do say a 5 second delay? In BASIC I would reset TIME and wait for it to pass a threshold, in assembler I ended up creating a counter that counter down from 255 in another loop that counted down to 255 and called that numerous times, way overkill, sure there's likely a real easy way.

BTW I only started learning it yesterday haha

[jgharston]

If you don't mind a keypress terminating the delay early:
LDX #centiseconddelay AND 255
LDY #centiseconddelay DIV 256
LDA #129:JSR OSBYTE

If it must delay the entire time, the simplest is to use *FX19 to count 1/50s VSyncs:
LDX #fiftithseconddelay AND 255
LDY #fiftithseconddelay DIV 256
.waitloop
TYA:PHA:TXA:PHA
LDA #19:JSR OSBYTE
PLA:TAX:PLA:TAY
DEX:BNE waitloop
DEY:BNE waitloop

This is how the BASIC V WAIT command works.