What have you leanred from this excercise?

A simulator should allow you to verify that the logic of your code is as you expected.
Was it?


All this tells you is that you have not broken any of the syntax rules of your assembler - it gives absolutely no indication whatsoever that the behaviour of what you've written will be as you expected - let alone that it will be correct!


What "response" do you expect?

What have you done to verify that anything is happening at all?
Have you used a scope to check if the strobe lines are working correctly?
And that pressing a key does actually cause the correct state change at the processor pin?

As Craig suggested, can you even flash a LED?

Once you can flash a LED (or, preferably, several LEDs), you can use them to indicate the state of your code and thus help you to debug it.
Better still if you can get the serial port working to give debug messages to a terminal.