R. Ford Denison's 2KSA

[pdragon]

Still toying with implementing a 65c02 assembler that runs natively and found a link to the 2KSA PDF in the source code repository.

As I studied I turned it into a literate programming markdown doc which compiles to a working image of his assembler. Actually it's more a tiny IDE with assembler, disassembler, line editing etc! There are a bunch of interesting ideas in there and instructive to see how he approached various tradeoffs and constraints.

Any chance anyone here has contact info for him? I'd like to confirm it's OK to share for educational purposes. I could only find an obit from March 2000 which might be him [luckily not!]

[pjdennis]

pdragon wrote:

Any chance anyone here has contact info for him? I'd like to confirm it's OK to share for educational purposes. I could only find an obit from March 2000 which might be him

Looks like this could be the Robert Ford Denison you're looking for, based on the following quote from the assembler article "More recently, my KIM-1 was part of a complex gas analysis system for my research on nitrogen fixation in soybeans."

https://cbs.umn.edu/directory/r-ford-denison

https://darwinianagriculture.com/

[pdragon]

Great sleuthing - that is indeed him, and he is happy to share for educational use:

Quote:

.. Yes, I wrote the 2KSA when I was *supposed* to be writing my PhD thesis on nitrogen fixation in soybeans. Forty-some years later, I'm still using microcomputers (Raspberry Picos running Python) to study nitrogen fixation in soybeans, among other things.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEP28v ... X8rfnXyo6Q
Yes, you are welcome to share anything based on the 2KSA -- whoever scanned the document should have asked, but that's OK.

[White Flame]

Nice, this is a great little piece of kit to help bootstrap other systems

[teamtempest]

Good job! Nice to see this.

[BigEd]

Good result!

[GlennSmith]

Hi all,
Oh goody !! I'm currently writing a self-hosting 65C02 assembler as a PLASMA module (the main core is actually working very well) but I would like to make it smaller and neater, because it will be required to be integrated into the self-hosting PLASMA compiler that is also on the workbench...
I've been mostly inspired by Daryl's (8BIT) assembler from SBC2.5, but I had also seen and liked 2KSA but wasn't sure whether it was available for "inspiration". Have any of you actually a machine readable (i.e. source) version of 2KSA?
(edit : I've now *read* Patrick's post and I'll play with what he's generated, thanks!)

Have a great end-of-year.

[Dietrich]

You might want to have a look at my assembler at https://github.com/Dietrich-L/CPM-65/tree/main/ASM
It is nativ, has MOS 6502 opcodes only and is very fast. No macros though.

The input is a text file, output is the assembled file and a label file. It is 6k in size and easy to port. However you need a file system to read the source file in 256 byte chunks and write the output files also in 256 byte chunks.

It could be extended for 65c02 Opcodes with some work.

If you need any assistance, let me know.

Dietrich

[GlennSmith]

Dietrich wrote:

You might want to have a look at my assembler at https://github.com/Dietrich-L/CPM-65/tree/main/ASM
... Dietrich

Thanks! I'll look at that also. I'm assuming that you're OK with it being re-released for another 65C02 platform ?

[pdragon]

For simplicity I added the generated .asm code to the repo as well as updating the author info. Happy holidays all.

[Dietrich]

GlennSmith wrote:

Dietrich wrote:

You might want to have a look at my assembler at https://github.com/Dietrich-L/CPM-65/tree/main/ASM
... Dietrich

Thanks! I'll look at that also. I'm assuming that you're OK with it being re-released for another 65C02 platform ?

Sure, you do that. Just put a link to my repo there in case there are questions.

Dietrich