BCD was outdated when I got my first Amstrad CPC (1984). The assembly language textbooks all said “this is a weird holdover from the 8080, don’t bother with it”.

BCD is still in use in many financial applications, where it's the usual way to handle decimal fractions which can't be exactly represented in binary (floating or fixed-point fractions).

Is there any advantage at all to BCD over the int number of cents? Either approach gives exact precision but requires a marker to say how many digits to the right of the decimal. Fixed-point decimal is vastly faster for calculations. BCD requires weird carry calculations, is less memory efficient per digit stored, and requires a choice between truly awful memory density (one digit per byte) or using bitwise operations to do nibble-level addressing.

Actually, the more I think about it the more awful it gets. I'll go ahead and assert that the only reason ever to consider BCD is for compatibility with legacy systems that use it, and even then you'd only want to use it on the edges of the codebase where the system interfaces live.

Not really, other than compatibility. When the previous poster said financial applications, what was probably meant was "mainframe applications". BCD is still popular on z/OS because it's a first-class format there, and even editors knows how to handle files that contain BCD values.

The usual approach is to use fixed point (often, integers with implicit point) or decimal floating point. Neither of which is BCD.