Sunday, October 6, 2024

ALPP 03-XX -- More Tools -- LWTools for 6809 and asm68c for 6800/6801

Decided to split the binary output chapters up and talk about the tools there. So this chapter will get absorbed into two of those. 

Go here for asm68c: https://joels-programming-fun.blogspot.com/2024/10/alpp-03-01-binary-output-6800-left-to-right-framework-by-include.html.

And go here for my discussion of using LWToolshttps://joels-programming-fun.blogspot.com/2024/10/alpp-03-03-binary-output-6809-left-to-right-framework-by-include.html.

 

More Tools
LWTools for 6809
and asm68c for 6800/6801

(Title Page/Index)

 

Again, I'll assume that you have EXORsim, Hatari, and EXORsim6801 running under *nix or Cygwin environment. If you've been following along, you must have, or you must have something equivalent set up and running.

EXORsim's built-in interactive assembler is great for small stuff, but our number of lines of code has already gone over a hundred, and when we have that many lines of code we really want a separate assembler.

William Astle (Lost Wizard) put together a very professional assembler, along with related tools for the 6809 and 6309, called LWTools. His support site is here:

http://www.lwtools.ca/

Instructions to build it are on that page, and there are links to the manual as well.

Building it is straightforward, and it supports standard techniques for changing the install directory. I was able to tell it to install to my user-local executables directory without fuss.

When you get through the install with no errors, you should be able to give it the command

$ lwasm --help

and it should list out various ways to call it. 

I've put together a much less professional assembler for the 6800 and 6801 which I call asm68c. (Just so you know, there's another project out there called asm68c which is not an assembler and has nothing to do with me. Don't ask me about it.)

The source code page you want is "code", not "a68c-code". (I really should do something about a68c-code, it was a blind alley, and I don't remember why I didn't just delete it.)

Anyway, the README file will be displayed under the master tree listing when you go to the source code, and it has some basic instructions for building and testing it. Parts of the README are a little out-of-date. But it should be enough to let you work on the tutorial sources.

While I have gone to the trouble of providing a make file for it, I've left the question of installing it up to you. It's one executable, so it's just one file to copy or link into your user local executables directory or wherever you want to run it from.

When you get it to compile without errors, try running it with 

$ asm68c -?

and it should respond with a bunch of stuff that I need to remind myself about. (Sorry) But there should be enough in there to remind you how to give it your source file name and how to tell it what kind of object to output and where to save the object, etc. (Yeah, the help listing is a bit out-of-date, too.)

Source to test it on?

 

(Title Page/Index)

 

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