• Assembly Assembler v1.0

    clintr • 10/08/2014 at 03:40 • 0 comments

    The first assembly assembler is ready. Below I will paste the code and explain how to assemble it with the BASIC assembler. First some comments, though.

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  • Can't Get Away From BASIC

    clintr • 09/23/2014 at 04:09 • 0 comments

    My next assembler is written and I'm working on testing it - hopefully I will be posting it here soon.  It will have 2 parts: one part (RUNASM.BA) written in BASIC, and another part (ASM.CO) written in assembly.  The reason is that for some tasks, it makes more sense to use BASIC, and there is no (easy/documented) way to call into the BASIC code from a machine language program, whereas there is a way to call machine language from BASIC.  RUNASM.BA will be listed below.

    I need RUNASM.BA to deal with getting input from the user, displaying messages to the user, and handling the input file being assembled.  Most of the tasks will only be required once or twice - except #1 (line 100 - get the next line from the input file); and #9 (line 900 - used for testing/debugging).  If the assembler is too slow, I will suspect task #1 first.

    The main reason that I want to use BASIC to handle the input file is that, as well as files in RAM, it can read from cassette, the serial port, and ** a diskette drive ** if you have one and have set BASIC up to use it.  (For example, there was available the "TANDY Portable Disk Drive" and a program called TS-DOS which could be hooked into BASIC - see the links on the left for more info.)   Note, though, that for now I'm only testing with RAM files.

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  • BASIC Assembler Fix

    clintr • 09/12/2014 at 03:42 • 0 comments

    Well, it turns out that BASIC strings can be at most 255 bytes long.  I was trying to keep all of the labels from an assembly file in one BASIC string, which meant I couldn't have very many labels.  Below is an updated BASIC assembler which fixes this problem by using arrays (turns out BASIC has arrays...)

    Here is the updated BASIC assembler:

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  • BASIC Assembler

    clintr • 08/15/2014 at 03:28 • 0 comments

    Can't find a way to add files to the project, so I'm just going to paste below - sorry.  First is the BASIC program, then a text file I wrote to document the code.  My apologies to anyone who tries to read this; I have no experience with BASIC.

    Here is the BASIC program:

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  • First Update

    clintr • 08/15/2014 at 02:55 • 0 comments

    To the person who gave me my first skull: thanks!

    I'll be adding weblinks to some sites with useful information for Model 100 programmers.  Among other things you will find other, better assemblers; I'm reinventing the wheel just for fun here.

    I have some files to share (the BASIC assembler is working!) and will be adding them as soon as I figure out how that is done...

    I started out programming on my Model 100, but it has only 8K of RAM.  8K is not enough for my BASIC assembler, so I've switched to the Virtual T emulator, which is a really useful tool.