Paul Flo Williams via cctalk wrote: > On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:23:41 -0500 (EST) > Will Cooke via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Here is a link to a family of assemblers that you should look at. I > > have no idea if the syntax will match, but I know the author goes to > > a good deal of pain to match manufacturer syntax for most of them. > > In the limited use I have made of a few of them, they have served me > > well. The author is VERY responsive to bug fixes and they are still > > under active development. http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/as/ > > That's two votes for as/asl then, thanks. > > Thank you for all the replies so far. I've loved working in assembler > since first touching a Z80 at school in 1982, but moving between > different processors (particularly older ones) has always been a bit of > a jarring experience because of the tools. I think "assemblers, yeah, > they're a solved problem, a mature set of tools" and then I realise > that, in many cases, "mature" means "rotten" and "unmaintained"! > > The first assembler I looked at for this was Ken Stauffer's as31, > despite it not having a macro facility: as Richard noted, macro > processing can easily be a bolt-on if necessary. However, it is written > in something like C90, and gcc threw so many warnings that I feared it > wouldn't produce an executable. When it did, I realised that, even > changing "db" to ".byte" throughout wasn't going to get my code to > assemble. The parser gets itself confused between binary and > hexadecimal constants if you use suffixed numbers. What is "0bch"? as31 > can't work it out. Wasn't going to spend time doing wholesale > replacements for that and its quirks of single/double quoting. > > Today, I'm working with W. W. Heinz's asem51, which is freeware, not > FOSS, but it has "standard" directives for specifying data and it > rebuilt a correct ROM binary for me with just a single textual change. > That is enough to keep me on track while I wrangle the code for now. > > As far as emulator/simulators go, I've started with Jari Komppa's > emu8051, which I will no doubt outgrow, but it has a really simple > ncurses interface that allows me to jump around the code and try out > various routines to check my understanding of 8051 behaviour. Case in > point: there was a table-searching routine which was supposed to return > Z or NZ for a result, but it was looping with DJNZ which, in my Z80 > brain, will always flag Z when it runs to completion. Aha! On the 8051, > DJNZ does not affect flags - weird! > > I'll take a look at Seemanta Dutta's gSim51 at some point. I braved the > popups of Sourceforge, ignored its "alpha" status and the fact it was > last updated 13 years ago and downloaded it. > > Loving the 8051 and this VT320 code so far. Thank goodness for the > availabilty of schematics and ancient datasheets. > > Regards, > Paul
asl seems to be a nice thing..agree fully. But I want just to mention the Frankenstein Corssassembler package, I've used it in the past: https://aminet.net/package/dev/cross/Frankenstein Regards, Holm -- Technik Service u. Handel Tiffe, www.tsht.de, Holm Tiffe, Goethestrasse 15, 09569 Oederan, USt-Id: DE253710583 [email protected] Tel +49 37292 709778 Mobil: 0172 8790 741
