Most assemblers either choke on some 68020+ constructs or don't have a proper peephole optimizer, usually not able to optimize forward branches (and, no, altering the source isn't a good idea : it fails miserably with macros and conditional assembly).
Often some features I find very handy are't supported (e.g. basereg directive). Some integrated environments can be a little bit on the unstable side or are even less practical to use than mere command-line.

All in all, only PhxAss can do it for me, despite its numerous (but minor) bugs. Vasm would too if it weren't so slow and memory hungry.
Made me wonder if i shouldn't write mine...

"ON N' EST JAMAIS SI BIEN SERVI QUE PAR SOI-MÊME" :o)
Kamelito

Another saying: "Chi fa da sé fa per tre".

A new integrated environment (editor/linker/debugger) would definitely be the best.
But a long and hard work..

Bye!
ross

If i ever write an asm it'll be command-line, even though i'm already using my own debugger since years.

Not that i dislike cli tool (on the contrary!) but for those approaching asm, or for some fast develop, integrated IDE is good.
[own debugger? it's public? just curious..]

Cheers,
ross

Have you tried ProAsm?

It's not public : it has no gui and is too much tailored to my own needs to be of any use for someone else.


No, i haven't.

But how can you stand the editor? It's so dreadful :(

The editor does its job pretty fine. Any important features are available. I don't need any full-blown text editor for asm coding so the editor of ASM-One/Pro works fine for me.

As a 68k asm newb, I tried both Asm-Pro and Asm-One but could not easily spot the difference, so I am not sure which one I should start with if I wanted to learn some 68k programming. And when you add PhxAss and Vasm into the mix, it becomes even more complicated. Would be much easier if people could just point to one which is universally accepted as being the best but things are never so simple..

For C64 assembly I prefer cross-assembling on the PC, but still haven't made up my mind if I want to go the same route with Amiga. Guess I won't find out for sure until I try it out. The relationship you have with an editor can be very personal and sometimes the chemistry is just wrong. :)

Indeed. It's impossible, because every assembler has other strengths, and every developer puts her or his focus on something else. It's a personal decision everytime.

• AsmOne/Pro for the IDE, with quick testing and debugging. Probably useful for beginners. Not so good for bigger projects, which require Makefiles and linking.
• Barfly and PhxAss are optimal on low-end hardware, because they assemble very fast and require only few resources.
• Devpac is *the* reference m68k assembler for Amiga and Atari and many other platforms (e.g. regarding supported directives). Has an IDE too, but works better without, IMHO.
• vasm may be the best solution for cross-assembling. Below a 060-machine you won't have much fun. Offers Devpac and PhxAss compatibility modes. Also includes some AsmOne directives. The only one still in development.

Also note that that my opinion may be biased, being the author of PhxAss and vasm... :p

For the beginning they are both fine and you can simply use either of them, the differences between ASM-One and ASM-Pro will only be important once you're a bit more experienced. The only exception here is if you work with RTG screens, then you should use ASMPro as it has much better RTG support than ASM-One.

That also means support is close at hand. :)
Sounds to me like my choice would be AsmPro/One for working on the Amiga and Vasm for cross-assembling.
Does Vasm also include a linker to run on the PC and does it work well with objects from, say, common Amiga C compilers or maybe GCC with 68k target on PC?

Very good point, so I should not bother with Asm-One since I would mainly be using it on an RTG display (Vampire).

Ok i've taken the time to check it and (as expected :D) it does not suit my needs (not to mention it's shareware and does not seem developed anymore).
From superficial test :
- does not "unoptimize" (= enlarge branches that are out of range ; instead, reports an error)
- no way to adapt code to target processor (something like __CPU to test with if/endc)
- basereg directive not implemented in the proper way
- chokes on accentuated characters in labels
- does not support offset sections
(etc, etc)


This is true for assemblers as well :agree

Having started my journey in monitor49152 on C64, there is no better place than home, I mean asm-one ;P.
I find its IDE so beneficial to my coding style&habbits and what I'm doing that it surpases anything else I've tried. My progression was seka => trash'em-one => asm-one.
But as already stated, if you are doing larger multi-file multi-language stuff you are better off with something else.
Yeah, it has bugs but nothing major for me. Some ~20 years ago when Price was in charge I sent bug resports and stuff was fixed. Is the project still alive? I haven't contacted Boushh, and it's been like 10 years since the last update.
Would be great to see it get open sourced >< so I could hopefully fix some of the stuff.

typed sys 49152 a billion times ;)

Same for me. :)

Seka, MasterSeka, ASM-One, Trash'm-One, ASM-One again (1.2x versions), ASM-Pro in my case.

I also sent bug reports and feature suggestions to both Price and Boushh and had nice conversations with both of them, they also fixed quite a few bugs I reported. ASM-One development seems dead these days but you never know, maybe Boushh has been working on the ultimate ASM-One version for the last 10 years. ;)


Original source of ASM-One (by Promax) is available, ASM-Pro has been open sourced as well but it is not exactly easy to maintain a very large source which mostly consists of disassembled stuff.

The portable linker, vlink ( http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vlink/ ) is a separate open source project. Vasm usually outputs object files in various formats, or raw binaries. For Amiga-Hunk and Atari-TOS it can also directly generate executables, so no linker would be needed.

Yes. All common object file formats are supported by vasm and vlink.

Probably everybody, who owned an Amiga early enough, had to start with Seka. I cannot remember any other assembler in 1986/87. :)

I started with Seka too, but proceeced over A68k to PhxAss (first versions were assembled by A68k).

If you have a Vampire with RTG, then you have enough performance and memory for vasm. It is probably easiest to install the vbcc compiler as you will get vasm and vlink.

http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc/

Then find an editor of your liking, preferably with ARexx (I use CED) and use the BDebug debugger which is in the Barfly package for a power users 68k development environment from the start ;).

http://aminet.net/dev/asm/BarflyDisk2_00.lha