Help me pick an assembler!

[Sheep64]

Greg816v2 on Thu 31 Mar 2022 wrote:

- Preprocessor directives like #include, #define, #ifdef, etc

It is possible to invoke a C pre-processor separately, for example, to use your favorite assembler with C style directives. The laziest way to do this is cc -E

[fachat]

Maybe I'm late but there still is xa65. Includes preprocessor statements. Lacks macros but those can be defined with #define.
Anonymous labels are there in my dev branch, maybe you can help me convince Cameron Kaiser to include them

Oh, and xa comes with ubuntu Linux

André

[fachat]

Having said that, in my personal style I'm still using #ifdef, but not defining constants with the preprocessor anymore. I'm using normal labels instead and have the benefit of scoping (yes xa has scopes defined with .( and .) )

[gfoot]

I've liked using xa. Local labels were very effective and allowed me to easily define modules with public and private symbols, as well as short range jump targets without needing unique names. It was also easy to export a symbol table for my OS so that programs loaded later from SD card could be built against it.

I need to try ca65 sometime though as I'm sure it can also do all of this too. It's on my bucket list.

[fachat]

I think only xa65 and ca65 have the capability to produce relocatable o65 files. I.e. relocatable once on load. I know it's an edge case ...

[vbc]

Greg816v2 wrote:

I've been using ACME to write code for a 6502 board, and as the project grows I'm running into more issues with how ACME works (such as very odd behavior when separating the project into different files). I'm trying to look at all the assemblers out there but I just feel like I'm missing something.

Hoping for the following:

- Support for 65C02 and 65816
- Runs on/can be compiled on Linux
- Uses as standard syntax as possible
- Preprocessor directives like #include, #define, #ifdef, etc
- Anonymous labels (i.e. +/-). After using this in ACME I don't think I can do without it.
- The option to generate an output binary that includes a block of address space assembled to. I.e. for an EEPROM, I have code at $8000 and vectors at $FFFA..$FFFF and the output is a 32K binary.

Every assembler I come across is lacking one of these, but I'm sure they exist, so... what are y'all using

FYI, Frank just added support for 65816 to vasm. You may want to have a look at the latest daily snapshot at http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm

[GARTHWILSON]

vbc wrote:

FYI, Frank just added support for 65816 to vasm. You may want to have a look at the latest daily snapshot at http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm

Are you sure? '816' is not found anywhere on your linked page.

[vbc]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

vbc wrote:

FYI, Frank just added support for 65816 to vasm. You may want to have a look at the latest daily snapshot at http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm

Are you sure? '816' is not found anywhere on your linked page.

Yes. The support has just been added some days ago. It is not yet included in the release versions and the web page has not been updated, but the daily source snapshot does contain the code.

[handyandy]

There’s also Merlin 32: http://brutaldeluxe.fr/products/crossdevtools/merlin/

Cheers,
Andy

[6502user]

Hi.

Can you help me also, please?

I'm starting to compile some code with the CCA65's CA65. When I compile it without MAcros, all is working ok. But if I use macros the macros don't be compiled (but the process don't give error.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

6502user wrote:

Hi.

Can you help me also, please?

I'm starting to compile some code with the CCA65's CA65. When I compile it without MAcros, all is working ok. But if I use macros the macros don't be compiled (but the process don't give error.

Are you compiling C code, or are you assembling?  Compiling and assembling are two different things.

[Proxy]

can you post some example code and the commands you use to assemble?

[BigEd]

A listing output from a small example would be helpful too.

[drogon]

6502user wrote:

Hi.

Can you help me also, please?

I'm starting to compile some code with the CCA65's CA65. When I compile it without MAcros, all is working ok. But if I use macros the macros don't be compiled (but the process don't give error.

You need to generate a listing file and have a look there. Use the -l flag like: -l file.l on the command-line with the rest of the ca65 command.

Then you should see the macro expansion - however note that ca66 will only show the bytes gnerated and not the actual assembler macro expansion..

Here is an example of a macro definition:

Code: Select all

.macro  waitBaud
.local  loop
        ldy     sBaud
loop:   dey
        bne     loop
.endmacro

and what it looks like in the code:

Code: Select all

 ; Delay 1 bit time
        waitBaud

so just one line of the macro name.

And this is what it looks like in the listing file:

Code: Select all

00005Br 1               ; Delay 1 bit time
00005Br 1               
00005Br 1  A4 rr 88 D0          waitBaud
00005Fr 1  FD           

The rr just means a relocatable value but if you were to disassemble that it would look like:

Code: Select all

        ldy     $EA
L109C:  dey
        bne     L109C

(and here you can see the relocatable value is $EA - not really important here)

Hope that helps.

-Gordon

[6502user]

drogon wrote:

You need .....

Here is an example of a macro definition: .....and what it looks like in the code:.....

Hope that helps. Gordon

Hi.

That helped me. Thanks.