AsmOne and/or AsmTwo
 

I recently came across this excellent asm/hardware tutorial series by Photon of Scoopex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10
I found this so inspiring, I decided to have a go at following it along and playing with it.

So first of all, I need an assembler, preferably something similar to what is used in the tutorial. Two candidates come to mind:

1. AsmOne -- v 1.48, as obtained from here: http://aminet.net/dev/asm/ASM-One.lha
I managed to install and run this, and the first example (wait for mouse) even seems to work, but the UI is very unstable/erratic. The results of certain commands (eg assemble) briefly appear on screen and the disappear. I've even got a yellow/recoverable alert when going into/out of the editor.

2. AsmTwo -- v 0.96r, as obtained from here: http://coppershade.org/file/AsmTwo.zip
This comes with 2 files, 1 of which is the readme. The other file (AsmTwo) is not executable, wether I try to launch it from the workbench or from the shell.

Am I doing something wrong here?
I probably should mention I'm running this on an A1200, 68EC030 @ 50 MHz, 16 Mb fast, OS 3.1, ROM 3.X.
TIA for any tips!

Oh, and btw, regarding the weird UI behaviour of AsmOne: both my workbench screen mode and the AsmOne screen mode are set to Pal - High Res (724 x 282).

Try ASM-Pro.


The "E" flag is not set, open a shell and type "protect PathToAsmTwo RWED" to set the required flags. Replace "PathToAsmTwo" with the full path of your AsmTwo file.

Fantastic advice, StingRay, thank you very much, AsmTwo works now! :)

Is there any reason to still do that, you think? I mean, now that we've got AsmTwo working?

If you're happy with AsmTwo then simply use that. It doesn't support 68020+ opcodes though which would be one reason for using AsmPro.

Ok, I see. I'd like to target the (unaccelerated, yet AGA enabled) A1200. Do I need 68020+ opcodes for that?

I might still try out AsmPro, btw, while I'm at it.. :)

Not necessarily but it sure makes sense to use 68020+ code on a 020 machine, especially table access is much more convenient (add.w d0,d0 move.w (a0,d0.w),d0 vs. move (a0,d0.w*2),d0 f.e.).

Alright, I've installed AsmPro and everything seems to work as expected, so I'll use that. Tbh, though, I have no idea what you mean by those table access examples. But hey, never mind, let's carry on! :)

Then you don't need any 68020+ support in your Assembler yet. :)

Well hurray for that! :cool

Still going to go with AsmPro, though, for now; you never know, right.. ;)

There is also release of Asm-One that is more recent: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64628

Once you get the hang of it, you'll surely switch to something better than AsmOne/Two/Pro ;)

Ok thanks, I'll check that out! :great

What do you mean? AsmThree? Come on, just name it! ;)

Don't listen to Thorham's Asm-One bashing yet. :) ASM-One/Pro have several flaws and some quite annoying bugs but they are fine for the beginning as they are very easy to use.

Once you started coding some projects you'll find out yourself if ASM-One/Pro is sufficient for you or not. And in the latter case you'll easily find quite a few alternatives (vasm, BarFly, Devpac etc.).

Ok thanks, that's a little clearer, albeit still somewhat mysterious.. ;)
I even remember Devpac being all the rage at some point, back in the day..

Barfly and PhxAss. They're better for bigger projects (more powerful and much faster), but they're not integrated like AsmOne/Two/Pro. However, like StingRay said, AsmOne/Two/Pro are great for learning, and also for quick tests, etc.

Thanks, got it (I think). I assume that by 'not integrated' you mean you have your editor, assembler, linker, debugger and so on, all as separate packages, and you kind of roll them into your development process as desired. Right? ;)

I'll definitely be fine with the easy/integrated environment for quite some time. This is my first proper go at amiga assembler coding (not counting that improper one about 30 years ago), so I'd like to focus on the code and the harware for now. There's plenty more stuff I need to understand first if I ever want to do anything decent with this.. :spin

Can you please list its flaws and bugs?

Thanks
Kamelito

Motion seconded! :)

Well, you don't have to list them all, but what would your biggest problem/beef with it?

Too many to list!

I don't actually have a problem working with AsmPro hence I'm using it for almost all of my projects. :) Most annoying bug is the crash that can happen randomly when jumping to the top of the source, for some reason ASM-Pro doesn't find the correct line ending and freezes. Nothing that couldn't be solved with the aid of an external debugger though. :) Other than that the incomplete 68020+ support is sometimes somewhat annoying as well (ASM-One is much better in this regard than ASM-Pro!) and there are lots of other (not so) small problems.

Despite the bugs it's still fun to work with Asm-One and its incarnations as they allow a very fast workflow as everything needed is there, debugger, assembler, editor. Esc/a/j FTW! :)