What timing! I’ve been down the 8051 rabbit hole for a few months now. I cut my professional teeth on Intel assembler back in the mid 80’s so. Never worked with the 8051 (8048/8085/8086/8088 were the processors I used).
What I’ve found so far that may be of use are: SDCC (Small Device C Compiler). It has an assembler, sdas. I haven’t used it. I also found the original Intel Macs-51 tools (macro assembler, linker, librarian). I probably prefer the Intel tools because they remind me of the tools I used way back when. The Intel DOS tools will run on msdos emulators, dosbox-x is one I found useful. It is possible to run dosbox-x without the gui (set up the DOS commands in the autoexec.bat) dosbox-x -silent -nomenu The Intel DOS tools are located here: https://www.retrocomputing.nl/wp-content/uploads/PLM-51/PLM51_V1_2.zip https://www.retrocomputing.nl/wp-content/uploads/PLM-51/PLM51_V1_4.zip Intel documentation can be found with an internet search at a number of sites. The relevant titles are: MCS-51 MACRO ASSEMBLER USER'S GUIDE MCS-51 UTILITIES USER’S GUIDE FOR DOS SYSTEMS EXTERNAL PRODUCT SPECIFICATION FOR THE MCS-51 OBJECT MODULE FORMAT The msdos emulator is here: https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/releases/tag/dosbox-x-v2026.01.02 I ran into problems building SDCC from the “official” repo. I used the following repo sucessfully: https://github.com/swegener/sdcc.git
