vasm 2.0

[phx]

Originally Posted by hitchhikr

There's a small catch, the last padding word of the header can't be 0 or the OS will reject it, any other value will do.

Wow! Exactly like the Atari-header again. A non-zero value in the last word means that the program is not relocated!

Maybe Digital Research (DRI) was providing development tools on both 68k systems?

Here's a small hand crafted .z which the OS will happily run at address $100000:

Thanks. The easiest and most logical approach was to include z-file support in the TOS output module (

-Ftos

). With tomorrow's vasm source snapshot you can use option

-zfile=<address>

to make the TOS module write an absolute z-file, already relocated for the given address.

[hitchhikr]

There are some more similarities, like the BIOS functions accessed via TRAPs instructions and the OS's via LINEF (compared to Atari's LINEA stuff).

[hitchhikr]

Ah, one more thing, i don't know if Vasm supports this but there's a feature i've seen in the x68000 official assembler and in an MS-DOS one used for MegaDrive games: the possibility to separate digits within numbers with an underscore, something like: %1111_0010_1000 or $12_34_56_78 (that feature is only made for visual help).

[phx]

Originally Posted by hitchhikr

the possibility to separate digits within numbers with an underscore, something like: %1111_0010_1000 or $12_34_56_78

Yes, I have seen that somewhere before, but it is really rare and I cannot say that I would use it.
Discussed that feature with Volker last night and he doesn't like it either. So, although it is easy to implement, we would currently not do it, unless there is relevant existing practice and some more requests for it from the community.
(Problem for me is that such a change in the expression parser affects all modules and always wastes some extra cylces to check for the underscore. So there must be a good reason.)

EDIT: In case we change our mind: can you provide a reference to the documentation for one of these assemblers? Are source texts otherwise compatible with vasm or would there be more incompatibilities?