Glad to help, please feel free to pick my brain either here (and if I don't see the post send me a PM/email and I'll respond).

One good thing about the tools is that you can write in C (they include a C compiler), then optimise those parts that need it in particular by writing those in ASM after you've got your code running. This menas the learning curve is not all that steep (at least to get something running, as opposed to getting something running as fast as possible!)