On Tue, Oct 20, 2026 at 5:19 PM Joshua O'Keefe <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Oct 20, 2026, at 4:22 PM, John R. Hogerhuis <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Yeah everyone's got their opinions on this. > > > > For whatever reason the Telemark TASM assembler is my favorite. Simple. > But yeah it's DOS + linux basically abandonware. But it's table driven IIRC > and supports our undocumented instructions and doesn't really change. > > I'm personally more or less OK with z88dk for what little I do, but it's > heavy and clearly not seamless for everyone to get up and running. The idea > of Telemark appealed to me but the black box closed source and the > difficulty of getting it up running made it a dead end for me when I tried. > Modulo the wide range of surely divergent opinions, what are folks' take on > assemblers like a85 and asm85? They seem like nice, lightweight, > straightforward options, often in the operating system's repo and fairly > portable/cross-platform. > > If we were to tell someone to "assemble this real quick and try...[thing]" > what would we point them to so that a dev environment becomes the very > least of their problems? No idea. I always end up solving my own problems. Probably over again from the last time I solved it and forgot. I guess what we should all probably do if we're sharing source is document the toolchain and how to put it in place in the README, etc There are common tools we all end up needing like things to make a .CO or to build a BASIC-as-DO injector. And we all need C and assembly header files with entry points and variable memory addresses. We should probably be organizing that stuff for discoverablity and reuse. Assemblers and compilers relevant to us... probably a wiki page would be nice with a table listing the known tools and their pluses and minuses, examples of public projects making use of them. If any. The actual value there would be provided by someone willing to take ownership and curate and maintain such a list. -- John.
