Well, I won't say it's the best thing ever but here's something new (for me):

First is the Assembler.cpp. What is it? It's an assembler for the '816, but with my own flavor added I guess. I am not following a lot of standard conventions here, but it works pretty well and has some cool features that I find helpful. It's not 100% tested out and probably has a bug or two, but as of now it seems to be working great!

Second is an example code for it, my Bootloader + Mini-Monitor. It fits in 512 bytes, and includes all that's necessarily for booting from a PIC + SD card, and in case that doesn't work, a 'rescue' mini-monitor that barely is usable at all. This would actually work with any of my current boards, given that I'm using a VIA for the PS/2 Keyboard and have bitmap style graphics somewhere directly accessible in memory. The 512 bytes contains all of the character bitmap data along with PS/2 to "hex" conversion tables. The monitor itself only displays zero page, but you can navigate around it using space, backspace, and return.

The C++ code isn't well commented, but the ASM code is pretty heavily commented. I'm also adding a screenshot of what my mini-monitor looks like from my old Acolyte Simulator. The characters are SUPER tiny so that I can fit everything in memory. The inverted character is where your 'cursor' is, and you can either alter it or move the cursor. You can run the code from the top of zero page by pressing escape.

An odd little thing indeed. It was this, or text-based Tetris. :/ What do you use as a 'rescue' monitor? A last ditch effort in case all else fails?

I went looking through the lists of '816 assemblers, but have been unimpressed. Maybe I didn't look into them well enough. What '816 assembler do you use? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it?

Thanks everyone!

Chad

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

I have in mind to assemble some tiny snippets of '816 code, and I plan to use BBC Basic as a native assembler - I believe the version for the Acorn Communicator should be usable, as disassembled by dominicbeesley.

I haven't used either of these, but two '816 assemblers are tagged on github: Rsar in Rust, and HIEPA in python.

The C256Foenix project uses 64tass (https://github.com/irmen/64tass) for the 65816 variants (and possibly also the 65c02 versions).

Communicator Basic has been on my radar for a while; I've been thinking about porting it to the C256Foenix (FMX), but I'm too easily distracted by other shiny things.

I did not, I looked at the list on this 6502.org website. I see a lot of the same ones mentioned, but I'll look again, thank you.



Oh that is easy to implement! Cool, I like it. Thanks for the idea. Right now my assembler only works in 8-bit mode, though native/emulator is supported (I believe?).



Haha! Well, I did essentially write it all from scratch in one day. This was my third attempt, and I find it easier to just start over than try to modify older junk. This one is MUCH improved over my previous versions. But because I code so fast I don't often leave comments.



Linux of course. I opened the file you posted, and saw an .exe in there and stopped... "Uh, BDD, what the heck?" Then I scrolled down and, "Oh! He *said* it was for Windows. Haha!"



I like that one so far. Thank you!



I looked at that, and the set of files is overwhelming. I'm sure it's super fancy, but wow, I feel like mine is working fine so jumping into a huge thing like that isn't worth my time to learn it. Still, thank you.

By the way, I'm planning on using a PIC + SD card bootloader configuration, similar to Garth's: viewtopic.php?p=91876#p91876 The difference between Garth's and mine would be he is using the I2C module for mass storage while I'm using an SD card, aside from that it's pretty similar in concept. I think he is also planning on using the PIC to 'spoon feed' the '816 with whatever memory it needs, while I will 'spoon feed' this 512 bytes and then wait for the '816 to ask for SD card memory.

Thanks everyone!

Chad

Let me add xa65 to the mix of 816 cross assemblers.

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Author of the GeckOS multitasking operating system, the usb65 stack, designer of the Micro-PET and many more 6502 content: http://6502.org/users/andre/

kinda surprised the C256Foenix doesn't use Calypsi C's Assembler as the compiler suite has a built-in target for the C256Foenix, so i thought they would just fully switch to that.

anyways, skimming through the code i notice a few things.

you already mentioned the lack of comments but i've also spotted some consistently inconsistent whitespace between operators. what i mean is that specifically in for loop initiations you don't place any whitespace characters between operators (example: "i=0") but almost everywhere else you do add whitespace (example: "value = 0"). personally i would always recommend having whitespace characters between operators for readability sake.

I'm also somewhat questioning the choice of using a giant 16MB array to hold the generated code instead of either a tmporary file or a dynamic array that is only roughly as large as it needs to be.

besides that and some long if-else chains that could be replaced by switch statements, and other more minor details, it looks pretty clean.


i mean that's what MSYS2 is for nowadays. as long as someone doesn't use functions that are too POSIX-y or too Windows-y, a program will very likely compile and run fine on both OSes. especially true for programs that don't go far beyond the standard C libraries.

I use ca65 from the cc65 suite to assembler 6502, 65C02 and 65C816 stuff. I like the way it works with separate modules & linker as that's the same as i've been using for a good few decades now (under Unix/Linux). It supports good, flexible macros and I can drive it from the command-line and use my own editors/Makefiles...

-Gordon

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Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

I use a homemade assembler with the concept from Table Assembler (external CPU instruction definitions) and basic assembly directives from 64tass and ca65. It's slower than most assemblers but it works.

It's clean because it was written in a single day I like to use whitespace normally, but inside for-loop constraints I do not. Sometimes I keep things without whitespace to show 'togetherness', like (var1 * var2 * (var3+1)), it kind of 'groups' things better in my eyes. The 16MB of RAM was super easy to use, and all PC's I know of have that much to spare so to me it's a huge waste but perfectly fine. Lastly, I do use switch statements but only sparingly. I actually dislike them for general use because of the blocking { } and the 'break's needed. I'm ok with blocking, and I'm ok with 'break'ing from a loop, but I don't like blocking and 'break'ing when not in a loop. Switch statements have their uses, but just not here apparently.

Off topic, I find programming like art. It's like I'm painting a picture. Sometimes I want to use this particular stroke, this particular brush, this particular pigment, this particular oil-base. My last two versions were more 'modular' with a lot of sub-functions. This one was like 2 functions outside of main(), which is just hilarious but totally fine. When I program with data at work, I use classes (read: fancy structs) all the time, but only because it's easy to use pointers as records.

Thanks for the programming analysis!





Thank you for the suggestions.



Sweet! That makes 1.5 of us (I'm only 0.5 at this point I suppose).

Thanks everyone.

Chad

Hi folks, I used CA65 myself a while ago. I'm programming for a VIC 20. I have to figure it out again, it's been so long. I will figure it out again. I can assemble but I can link going by my notes. It's a good assembler.