Hi, I was about to convert some old 6502 source code over to DASM and thought it might be cool to instead use the original tools (this is for an emulation project) if possible.

I grabbed a couple older assemblers off the net but none of the ones I tried were able to handle this particular format and set of directives. From some old doc I found it looks similar to the AMAC Atari Macro Assembler but I wasn't able to try this one.

The code is for a CP/M system that uses a 6502 as its graphics controller. It is circa 1983.

some "fingerprints":

PAGE
ORG
EQU
DB, DW, DS
HIGH / LOW pseudo ops
Hex values suffixed with 'H' vs. prefixed with '$'

The entire source file can be found at
http://bramante.metabarn.com/visual1050/src/DBOOT.ASM

Any other leads on what might have been used?

Thanks.

could it be tasm?

edit: hmm, no sign of high or low directives.

edit: nice challenge!

almost thought Merlin until the h for hex which is more a pc convention.

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Going by the mention of a Z80 in the text and the string of $1A characters at the end of the file making the file up to an exact number of 128 byte blocks I'd say it is one of the CP/M cross assemblers.

Lee.

CP/M cross-assemblers were the first suspects but none that I checked out matched. The source file did come off of a CP/M source distribution disk from Visual, so the the trailing ^Zs may just be a remnant of that and not necessarily indicative of the native build environment. Strange that Visual did not notate the build environment they used. Maybe it was home grown (though the Z80 code compiles with vanilla CP/M MAC).

The first CP/M assembler I looked at, MACRO-80, supports all those ops and there is/was a version that could output 6502 code.

Lee.