Creating Macros

[Lonewolf10]

Hi,

I have already created some macros for use in my own ASM code, but I am wondering if it is possible to create a macro to print text that follows it, for example:

    Print "text"

I could dump all the text strings together and select them by number, but that is time consuming and these text strings are only going to be for debugging.
I tried doing the following, but it seems to just end up pointing the address registers to nothing!

    Print    MACRO
             move.l    /1,a1
             ENDM

Is it possible to do this in DevPac 3.18?

[Leffmann]

One way of doing it (you may have to change the syntax for DevPac):

Print    macro
         lea   .text\@, a0
         ...
         bra   .done\@

.text\@  dc.b  \1
         even
.done\@
         endm

[phx]

You can get rid of the branch instruction when you put the strings into another section (e.g. "data"). Or put them into a second code section and rely on the linker to merge it with your main code section, due to PC-relative references (or force the merge with some small-code option).

A separate section for strings also has the advantage that you don't need to align the address after each definition.

Print   macro
        section texts,code
.text\@ dc.b    \1
        dc.b    0

        code
        lea     .text\@(pc),a0
        bsr     print_function
        endm

If you want to create absolute output instead of an AmigaDOS executable you can still use sections, but define the layout in memory using a linker script. For example:

SECTIONS {
        . = 0x10000;
        .text: { *(CODE code) *(texts) }
        . = ALIGN(2);
        .data: { *(DATA data) }
        . = ALIGN(2);
        .sdata: {
                _LinkerDB = . + 0x7ffe;
                _SDA_BASE_ = . + 0x7ffe;
                *(.sdata __MERGED)
        }
        . = ALIGN(2);
        .bss: { *(BSS bss) }
}

[Lonewolf10]

Thanks for the help guys