Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

Stewart C. Russell
looks at the thinking
man's version of AM
furniture - public
domain software.
Read the instructions
carefully and you too
could be a DIY hero
with word processors,
Assemblers and C
Home
assembly
time
W articles I had hoped to do
Hspecial
features on "Build Your Own"
Esystems,
such as a Build Your Own
N Home Business pack, or a Build Your
I Own Programming system. This first
stime
I present the Build Your Own
tAssembly
Language Development kit.
a
Quite a lot of people want to get into
assembly language programming, but
r
the high cost of an assembler/debugger
t
system either puts people off, or turns
e
them to piracy.
d
I don't (as you know) dig theft, and
wit
grieves me to see Kuma's K-Seka on
ropen
download from unscrupulous
iwirlitrc
bulletin boards. None of these
tboards,
I hasten to add, are in the UK.
i The absolute minimum you need is
nan
editor, an assembler, a linker and a
g debugger. Everyone already has a
tdebugger
in the shape of Commodore's
h
ROM-Wack burnt into the Kickstart
eROM.
Unfortunately, to use ROMsWack
you need a 9600 baud serial
e
terminal and a very large masochistic
streak.
You can use Commodore's Ed, Edit
(yucko !) or MEmacs as your text
editor, or you can go for a slightly
better one from the many available in
the PD collections. Remember, you
don't need (and often don't want)
word-wrap, so the tiny Textra we gave
away yonks ago on a cover disk is
adequate.
Assembler-wise, there's really only
one choice. A68k, written by Charlie
Gibbs, has been continuously
upgraded over the last three years. It's
fast, feature-filled, and free. It's a plain
68000 assembler, which takes a source
file on disk and writes a linkable
Thrn Hex
gibberish
into
mnemonic
gibbersh
with Mon
Workbench Screen
E PUBLIC DOMAIN E
object file back.
You need a linker to convert the
linkable object file to an executable
object. There's only one available, and
that is Blink, by The Software
Distillery. It's several orders of
magnitude quicker than the
Commodore/Metacomco Alink, and
has a few extra features too.
The debugger is of extreme
importance. As long as an assembler
and linker do actually assemble and
link, you can create code. But if the
debugger doesn't have as many
features as possible, you may never
find the subtle bug which is stopping
your program from running correctly.
limo Rossi's Mon v
Disk - 310 is a Freeware interactive
monitor 1.24 and o disassembler. n
It is not, as
F i s h
Hmiga Monitor vl • 24 lo,AXILli%%111,11%‘%1111k%%%%%%%‘%%%%
1First segment at $002078118
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Segment list:
I startloc endloc length
0 $88287888 $882878C7 32
-> m $80287888 $002878C7
80207888:
88287888:
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PC=882078118 CCR=84 X=8 N=8 2=1 V=8 C=8
D0=8888081E D1=08888088 D2=00808888 D3=80888888
D4=80088808 D5=88088888 D6=88808880 D7=08808888
80=882878C6 81=88080888 82=88800808 83=80088888
84=00800880 R5=88888868 86=00888880 87=01126C3C8
80287888 4280 c r . ! d8
-) 1
AMIGA WWI 'TING November 1990 93