Revolution Software

Spencer · Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006 8:54 pm Post subject: Assembler Discussion

In this forum, you'll be able to find the latest builds of my assembler. It's stable, easy to use, and most of all fast: three or four times as fast as TASM. The key lies in opcode searching, here is where the most time is spent.

Most of all, there will be directives specifically to format output to be compatible with Jim and my app signer, for the first time making building apps for the 83+ series quick and simple.

This is no IDE, it doesn't cater to beginners. If you've written z80 in TASM's style, this assembler is almost entirely compatible (TASM and I disagree on a few points) and will speed up assembly significantly.

A few unique features:
- The #include pre-assembly operation will autodetect binary and bmp files, importing .bmp straight to data.
- Optional label or define export in the form of equates.
- Can export a statistics file that shows the sorted opcodes and the amount of times they are used.

Kevin · Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006 9:10 pm Post subject:

I wondered when you'd talk about it publicly! I really like the #include bitmaps idea, too bad it's just monochrome Sad

. Oh well, can't ask for to much. I wonder how much it compete's with Ben's feature for feature?

threefingeredguy · Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006 9:28 pm Post subject:

Is BoogerASM still being considered?

Jim e · Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2006 9:35 pm Post subject:

It is most definately faster then tasm by a huge margin. From when I ran it it's 2.6 times faster than tasm. Bens say his can be 2 to 6 times slower than tasm. So when you're coding in hyper speed you know who to pick.

Spencer · Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2006 2:12 am Post subject:

First public build. Should work pretty well, it built Zelda.

NanoWar · Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2006 4:58 am Post subject:

[deleted]
...then I have to use Brass for .varloc Sad

burntfuse · Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2006 6:20 pm Post subject:

Any plans to release the source code? (It'd be nice to finally have a decent assembler for Linux)

threefingeredguy · Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2006 9:45 pm Post subject:

And Macintosh.

Spencer · Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 3:10 am Post subject:

Yeah, the source should be fully portable to linux (it may just be a simple matter of moving the source to a linux machine). I'm not a big fan of big endian, so it'll take some work to get it to work on a mac, unless of course you have one of the messed up new macs.

I'd really like to express how easy this assembler and wabbitsign have made it to build Zelda, so I've took a video of realtime assembly and signing of Zelda, a four page app at least 20k of code.

http://group.revsoft.org/app.avi

tr1p1ea · Delux User Joined: 11 Sep 2005 Posts: 265

Nice and fast ... but whats with the 'Label XXXX not found' errors? Yet it still assembles and is signed? Neutral

.

Kevin · Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 7:17 am Post subject:

Weird.

This looks great Spencer. I can't wait to try it out Smile

I think I'll do so tonight, with the new appsigner too Razz

Jim e · Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 8:03 am Post subject:

He told me it will render a file no matter what I believe. But if an error comes up and you don't do some thing about it, it could be bad.

I believe if you put some thing like
ld a,
it will generate
ld a,0

And some other obvious things that tasm would just scream at you for will also be assumed. That is IIRC.

tr1p1ea · Delux User Joined: 11 Sep 2005 Posts: 265

Hhmm... i dont like the idea of an assembler 'assuming' things. It could make finding bugs more difficult.

threefingeredguy · Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 11:07 am Post subject:

It still tells you there is an error there, it just makes a workable 8x*.

Spencer · Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2006 12:28 pm Post subject:

When errors or values are missing, it's not fatal. It will insert zeros so the code is still generally valid. The missing labels in this case are actually missing, but the code that references them isn't used, haha.

Keep in mind that all bad syntax or missing data will generate an error.