65816 Assembler for Windows

fachat · Post by **fachat** » Sun May 15, 2011 8:17 am

bound wrote:

nobody wants to help ? one week online , more then 200 openings and only one comment from grumbler ? . I have spend a lot of time working on this software . OK , one million dollar question .. is any one interested ??

FWIW - I have created my own xa65 assembler that you can download for free on the web, including support for my o65 file format that I need for my operating system, and C-like preprocessor which is used in most of my code as well. So I am pretty tied to it, it's integral part of my tool chain.

Does your assembler have any interesting (new) features that would make it worth looking into? You say it's early stage, so I assume not, but do you plan anything? That would be something to make it interesting for me.

I don't use windows for my 8-bit development anyway. So I can't even test it. Are you going to create a linux version?

Besides: I'm doing that for a hobby. You haven't answered the question about open sourcing your assembler. I am not inclined to support a closed source program, that fades away once you loose interest, just because there is no source publicly available.

You didn't mention your intention behind the assembler. Are you doing it for your personal educational experience? Or do you want to make it a shareware product or else? Going here like "here's my code for just another 65816 assembler, please test it" without any more explanation is something I'm very likely to ignore...

Sorry

André

bound · Post by **bound** » Sun May 15, 2011 8:51 am

Hi .

well , I not going to release the source code . My plan was to create FREE 65c816 assembler . I emphasize the word free . About new features , sure anything you want guys , but at the moment the assembly engine have to be tested , if that will pass the tests new options will be added .

Quote:

That would be something to make it interesting for me.

expectation , expectation , zero help .

Quote:

I am not inclined to support a closed source program, that fades away once you loose interest, just because there is no source publicly available.

Fair enough .

This is and always will be a freeware !

What next guys ?

BigEd · Post by **BigEd** » Sun May 15, 2011 9:15 am

To be fair, bound, it does take some investment to test a program. So, even though you've already done a lot of work in writing it and getting it this far, you may need to go further to get people comfortable in investing the effort to run it and get to know it. Even a minimal website would increase the confidence that it will still be there in six months, and similarly some documentation.

Do you have some means of measuring how many downloads you've had?

(So far this year, 13 people have looked at the files on our beeb816 page. The '816 isn't a high-traffic niche!)

Cheers
Ed

GARTHWILSON · Post by **GARTHWILSON** » Sun May 15, 2011 9:33 am

Some good points have been made. Can someone list (preferably with links) whatever free '816 assemblers are available already, if any, and whether they are open-source. Andre has already mentioned his xa65 which has been extended to '816. I have the C32 assembler (not free) which is available in a Windows version but I use it under DOS. It is a very nice professionally written commercial assembler. I'm using only Linux on this computer and I won't go back to Windows, but obviously many others are still using Windows. Testing a new assembler is a major investment of time, and things on this forum happen very slowly since most of us do this stuff when we don't have to mow the lawn or...work. I would definitely like to see the '816 promoted though. Daryl is about to offer his SBC-4 with the '816, and I would like to port my '816 Forth to his board so the newbie can have a turnkey solution that gives results right out of the box. It will have an assembler integrated with it, but really only for writing primitives, runtimes, ISRs, and other short-ish routines, not whole big applications written in assembly. Making major changes and re-assembling the kernel would require a normal macro assembler. (I would provide all source code and documentation for the kernel though.)

bound · Post by **bound** » Sun May 15, 2011 9:40 am

BigEd :

Thank you for your interest .

What did you meant by investment ? , many people here working with 65c816 cpu , so I'm sure they have some sources they can compile and see if the code compiled with other tools are the same . Any way , lots of you saying " I have my own compiler " did they share ? . NO . I will keep working on this project . I can test it for myself no bother . I think we can close this thread now .

Project free assembler for windows is closed .

BigEd · Post by **BigEd** » Sun May 15, 2011 9:56 am

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Some good points have been made. Can someone list (preferably with links) whatever free '816 assemblers are available already, if any, and whether they are open-source.

Here's what I'm aware of:

A65, part of Dev65 by Andrew Jacobs (BitWise), cross platform, java source here
ca65, part of cc65 by Ullrich von Bassewitz, open source, cross platform, binaries available
xa65 by André Fachat (now maintained by Cameron Kaiser) open source, portable
ACME by Marco Baye, open source, binaries for various platforms
MXASS by Michael Steil, source, freeware, binaries for DOS/Windows (older version)
WLA DX by Ville Helin, cross platform, open source, binaries for Windows.
HXA65 by Anton Treuenfels (teamtempest), open source (awk), binaries for DOS/Windows

See also http://www.6502.org/tools/asm/

Mmm, shouldn't that be "ca65" (65x assembler) and not "cc65" (C compiler)?

There's also HXA65 by self. The listing here on 6502.org doesn't mention 65816, but HXA65 supports it nonetheless. Open source (but in TAWK, a compiled variant of AWK. Could be ported to GAWK with some effort, I suppose). Binaries for DOS/Windows.

Should be a new version soon, but almost all new features are oriented toward assembly listings (I saw a listing that impressed me last year and decided I wanted HXA to do that).

BigEd · Post by **BigEd** » Mon May 16, 2011 7:27 am

That's great, thanks for the correction and clarification: I've updated my list (not sure what you might do with your quoted version of it!)

I note you also have a testsuite: always good to see those!

I'll also mail Mike N with the updated information so he can update the static index page.

I wouldn't have guessed there were so many.

Cheers
Ed

teamtempest · Post by **teamtempest** » Mon May 16, 2011 11:00 pm

BigEd wrote:

I note you also have a testsuite: always good to see those!

Oh yes, it's been very helpful in making sure HXA does what I say it should do. Also making sure it still does what I say it should do when I add something new.

But it's not a panacea. There are so many tests that manual checks for any version focus mainly on the new or revised parts. Automatic checking of the rest makes sure what worked before still works and what didn't still doesn't. However sometimes something that has become just a little off, but not enough to cause an error message, can sneak through. There are two bugs in the current posted version that got in this way, and got found only because I happened to manually run the relevant tests again.

Another problem is that I can only test for what I can think of. It has become quite apparent over time that sometimes my imagination is not as wide-ranging as it could be. There is a third bug that has been lurking for years, simply because until yesterday (literally) it never occured to me to check for it. Even that's not quite accuarate; I was actually checking for something else and got a failure, but not the one I was expecting.

Sometimes a test can tell me something years after I wrote it. I've added macro names and their expansion counts to assembly listings in the development version, which showed me that in one larger test a) three macros had never been expanded since I wrote the test (my bad!) and b) the one expanded most often was not the one I would have guessed. Live and learn...