Seeking the Melbourne House Macro Assembler

[BigEd]

As spotted, a plea for help:

Quote:

back in the day I remember doing my programming using the "Melbourne House Macro Assembler" which I believed to be a copy of MH's in-house tool. I can't find any sign now that it ever existed. Did it? Maybe a rebrand of something else?

Any ideas?

[bremensaki]

Thanks for posting this and pointing me at the forum! Plenty of cool stuff to read here.

Anyway, I'm still not sure if my memory is faulty or if the assembler has really been lost to time. I'm pretty certain that what I used was definitely called the Melbourne Hose Macro Assembler, but I'm starting to believe it might have been something that some random person had just renamed that way.

I found this interview with Nigel Spencer on C64.com that describes the development environment at MH back in the day, and says they used BBCs and XTs.

Quote:

Originally, we used Acorn BBC computers to program the C64 as they had much faster drives that also were dual disk and dual sided. They had the assembler and linker apps onboard on ROM's which meant they didn't have to load these programs from disk (we used the BBC ADE assembler back then). They were connected directly to the expansion port on the C64 to send code and data at high speed. Eventually that changed to the PC XT with a hard drive.

This doesn't mean there wasn't an in-house native tool on the C64 as well, but it's definitely filling me with a lot of doubt.

Anyway, if anyone stumbles over this in the future and knows more, I'd love to hear about it!

[BigEd]

Welcome, Mike, and thanks for the interview pointer. Always nice (to me) to hear of Beebs being used as engineering tools!

[BitWise]

ADE was a very slow assembler. It assembled from disk to disk reading one character at a time (using BGET/BPUT). I used it to write a database ROM for the BBC with a friend. We made and drank at lot of tea waiting for that assembler to run. Easily 15 minutes to build a 16K ROM.

[BigEd]

(BTW, I've posted on StarDot too.)

[cjb]

A high-school friend of mine, Marc Walters (of the "how many C64s were made" fame interviewed Melbourne House developers for Australian Commodore Review. I recall him mentioning the use of IBM-XTs, with an in-house expansion board that uploaded/bootstrapped (also modified) C64s via the User port.

He return from that visit with a nice pirated copy of EDIT64, which was PAL Assembler with a few mods and additions. The decayed protons in my brain are telling me it was used for developing "Spy Vs Spy"... but that doesn't check out.