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From: sbp@panda.UUCP (Brown Pulliam)
Newsgroups: net.micro.cbm
Subject: Re: cbm assembler
Message-ID: <951@panda.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Sep-85 10:41:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: panda.951
Posted: Thu Sep 26 10:41:12 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Sep-85 06:16:26 EDT
References: <2937@ncsu.UUCP>
Reply-To: sbp@panda.UUCP (Brown Pulliam)
Organization: GenRad, Inc., Concord, Mass.
Lines: 39
Summary: 

In article <2937@ncsu.UUCP> kwf@ncsu.UUCP (Kenneth W Fernald) writes:
>Does anyone out there have any experience with the macro assembler
>package written by cbm for the c64 ...

That was the first assembler I tried for my C-64, and I was somewhat 
put off by what I considered un-necessary complexity. It does include
an Editor which you load first. This editor is not bad, though I 
would prefer one that doesn't need line numbers. After you have
completed your source program, you load and run the Assembler, which
has a number of options regarding what gets displayed on the screen
or printed out (if you have a printer). At this point, I begin not
liking this system, because there is no way you can just assemble
to a particular block of RAM, you must assemble back to disk (or
cassette, I think) and even then it is not a straight object file,
but must be brought back by first loading a Loader program. This
is probably useful if one is trying to link several object files
into one big machine language program, but is a lot of messing
around  if all you want to do is write a moderate length M.L. task.

I haven't been able to try all the assemblers I've seen advertised,
but one that can be used as a "resident" assembler that has the
option of assembling directly to another part of RAM (or Disk
as well) is PAL by Brad Templeton, available from PROLINE in
Canada. It uses the built in C-64 Kernal editor, and sells for
about $39.  They (PROLINE) also sell a BASIC enhancement called
POWER that includes a better line oriented editor (with search
and replace, etc) that is useful for creating your assembly
source program and is frequently sold as a package with PAL,
but if you are attempting to keep everything resident, and 
assemble to RAM, POWER takes away some of your available RAM
space.

What I would like to find, and if anyone can point me to it
I would be grateful, is an Editor-Assembler combination like
Rockwell had for their AIM-65 single board computer. In that
computer, the editor was part of the 8K monitor, but had
nice simple commands, and the assembler was a 4K ROM add-on.

Brown Pulliam (My opinions are not GENRAD's)