[Featured][Dev] Zelda (Best Project 2005)

Spencer · Post by **Spencer** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 5:23 am

Happy to report that Zelda assembled in just under two seconds. Apparently nobody's tried making an efficient assembler before! The error system still sucks (gives you line numbers but not file names), but honestly, since TASM was generating millions of pointless unmaskable errors anyways, this is much better.

blueskies · Post by **blueskies** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 8:30 am

uh oh, does BRASS have some competition?

Stickmanofdoom · Post by **Stickmanofdoom** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 11:46 am

Sounds promising! When are you planning to release a public version?

Post by **benryves** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 1:33 pm

Spencer wrote:Apparently nobody's tried making an efficient assembler before!

Tried, maybe... success, maybe not.

I don't do anything special, just dump opcodes/labels/macros into a hash table. The slowness of Brass is because of the macro preprocessor.

Hmmm....Brass added Defpage directive.... does that work for intel hex?

Should do, but I'm not sure how bug-free it is. (It's early days!). I'm more familiar with the (much simpler) mapper on the SMS so will "practice" with that; Gambit's sent me a whole bunch of useful stuff to do with the 83+ app format so hopefully Brass will output straight to 8xk.

KevinJB · Post by **KevinJB** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 1:33 pm

Happy to report that Zelda assembled in just under two seconds.

* imagines assemblying a file instantly *

That dungeon is hard. The puzzles are super cool though.

Jim e · Post by **Jim e** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 1:49 pm

benryves wrote:
Hmmm....Brass added Defpage directive.... does that work for intel hex?
Should do, but I'm not sure how bug-free it is. (It's early days!). I'm more familiar with the (much simpler) mapper on the SMS so will "practice" with that; Gambit's sent me a whole bunch of useful stuff to do with the 83+ app format so hopefully Brass will output straight to 8xk.

Nice! I give it try later.

Now it's a race between the 2 of you. Let's see who finishes the dream assembler first!!!

Unmark....
Get Set....
CODE!!!!

CoBB · Post by **CoBB** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 2:07 pm

Has anyone thought of integrating an assembler into PTI? I've been playing with the thought myself.

Just imagine, the whole building cycle would consist of nothing but sending your main source file to the emulator. No stupid dependencies and directory structures or whatever, just a single independent standalone taking care of everything. Mmmm...

Post by **tr1p1ea** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 2:55 pm

o .... m .... g .... !

I dont know if this universe would enable such an awesome combination to exist.

Jim e · Post by **Jim e** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 3:07 pm

Single standalone taking care of everything, Don't make my life to easy man.

kalan_vod · Post by **kalan_vod** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 3:43 pm

Nice, you guys are just improving everything now aren't you!

dysfunction · Post by **dysfunction** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 5:16 pm

CoBB wrote:Has anyone thought of integrating an assembler into PTI? I've been playing with the thought myself. Just imagine, the whole building cycle would consist of nothing but sending your main source file to the emulator. No stupid dependencies and directory structures or whatever, just a single independent standalone taking care of everything. Mmmm...

Do you mean the ability to just hit "Build" then "Run" and it sends your file straight to PTI (with Ion or Mirage if they are dependencies) and executes it? Because that would be awesome. Perhaps such a thing could be integrated into Latenite?

Timendus · Post by **Timendus** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 5:30 pm

@CoBB: Why don't you make it? Afraid Spencer's or Ben's will be better?

Anyway, I think Latenite with Brass and PTI "integrated" would be better for my purposes. So it doesn't really matter if Brass compiles my code or Latenite, as long as it gets compiled and runs

CoBB · Post by **CoBB** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 5:41 pm

It's Ben's turn to improve integration now, let's wait for him to cook up your new dream environment.

Since Spencer's assembler is a C program just like PTI, I don't think a marriage would pose too much technical difficulty. Of course, I might write my own assembler just for the fun of it.

(To be honest, it's been a recurring thought for years, but since TASM always worked for me, I never had real motivation to realise it.) But this is really just a vague idea, there are much more important things to do first.

Post by **benryves** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 6:33 pm

CoBB wrote:It's Ben's turn to improve integration now, let's wait for him to cook up your new dream environment.

Sadly, I'm not Superman, and I do have a job, and the integration part is fairly massive and is (comparatively) difficult to develop, so bear with me.

Spencer · Post by **Spencer** » Mon 30 Jan, 2006 9:26 pm

I'm no IDE maker

, that's up to Ben. I've got a little ways to go before mine is "user friendly" and completely compatible with TASM (I'm mostly lacking in the directive area).
As for integrating, the output functions are generalized (in order to support varying methods ... hex, binary, binary + list file, etc), so it would be very reasonable to just hand it a pointer to a function which writes to a provided buffer in addition to a file. I'll work towards making a general and consistent error system, as well

.