6502.org

Clearly, FORTRAN die-hards

Hi all,
I recently wrote my own assembler, in PLASMA, to be included in the self-hosting compiler environment. (PLASMA allows you to include assembler routines in the high-level source code)
I initially thought that insisting that labels start in column 1 would make coding easier. Once I really got into the complexities of detecting and handling labels I found-out that it didn't really matter. Anything that isn't a valid opcode mnemonic (thanks Daryl '8-BIT') is treated as a potential label (and discarded if it isn't referenced anywhere).

Naw, not really. If they were, the label would be truncated after column 5, and statements could not start before column 7. Also, you wouldn't be able to use labels starting with `C` because that would be a comment line instead. (And I guess all labels would be purely numeric.)
Well, whether you want to or not, you are apparently entering them as Unicode in modern versions of Windows, because that's what's going in your file. (The number you type may not be the Unicode code point number, but then again, when you type the letter 'a' you are not typing a Unicode code point number, either.)

I use Ophis

Does the -i option actually work in as65? I've been fighting with it for six and a half hours so far, and it simply REFUSES to work.

This is my command line:
C:\Apps\Programming\as65\as65 -i -x -w125 -lMini65.lst -oMini65.bin Mini65.asm

It just spews out page after page after page after page of "Invalid mnemonic":
307: AND #15
"Mini65.asm",307 : Invalid mnemonic.
309: PHP
"Mini65.asm",309 : Invalid mnemonic.
310: SED
"Mini65.asm",310 : Invalid mnemonic.

-i is listed in the documentation as "ignore case in mnemonics".

v1.42, which is the latest version on Frank's website.

I've been going through my 6502 projects with the intention of making them easier for other people to build with assemblers other people use. A lot of my code has been written with the BBC BASIC assembler to take advantage of being able to use BASIC features, but a lot of my code doesn't need that, and can be assembled with a plain assembler.

Some of the code has if/else/endif blocks so needs that functionality. Some needs something like a command-line -DEFINE option, but that can often be avoided by having a "launch" file that then includes the main code.

I've got several assemblers:
as65
vasm65
cc65
beebasm

but it's a fight trying to get code into a state where it is minimally simple to convert to different assembler syntax. byte vs db vs .byte, if vs .if, equ vs =, $hex &hex 0xhex, -ignorecase options don't, everything must be lower case (don't mind everything upper case, that's my habit), sometimes always label: sometimes always label, sometimes label: or label depending on context or the phase of the moon, argh!!!!

I've got some bits of code I've put together that manages to automate converting between some formats. What advice would people recommend for a most-common-case target?

Here are some samples:
https://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/6502/Code/ansi.src
https://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/6502/Code/input.asm
https://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/6502/Code/Ha ... s2kbd1.asm
https://mdfs.net/Software/Tube/6502/Mini65.asm
https://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/ProgTips/GST ... rans65.asm

Beebasm has been a leap forward as it’s multi platform.

Any assembler which is stable or maintained and has a reasonably large and preferably supportive user base is a good choice.

For me, the acorn community and beebasm fits the bill. It’s not the only one which does that of course - a person might be closer to the apple or the commodore communities. Or Atari, which for some reason I tend to forget!

There’s certainly no universal choice.

That's an interesting view. And you think that whatever 6502 assembler they used to write BBC BASIC also used '&' instead of '$' for hex? I wonder what assembler that would have been. And you're quite sure that using '$' for hex in the embedded assembler wouldn't have interfered with string indirection ('$a = "hello"') and embedding BASIC variable and function names (such as 'STRING$(...)') in assembly code?
Was it really that early? The first commit in the repo says "BeebASM v0.01 - first released Dec 20 2007" which would, to provide but one example, put it a good decade or more after the first C version of ASL, which was multi-platform in both senses of the word that come to my mind ("runs on multiple operating systems" or "supports multiple CPUs").

Fair point, anything written in reasonably simple C should be portable and multi-platform.

I suppose I'm thinking of modern times, especially for people who like an IDE... but most of all, BeebAsm gives you the additional features of something very like an assembler embedded in Basic. Like having a preprocessor and macros, but even more so (because a programming language)

I really like vasm. It works very well for me and you don't have to run a linker if you don't want to. And it's still being updated.

http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm/