Archive for August, 2006

A better assembler, Kick Assembler

ACME was the longstanding winner in crossassembling tools for c64, until now that is. Kick Assembler is a crossassembler with a truly original idea. Forget about switching to other tools and programming languages to precalculate your vectors, unrolling your loops, converting your data etc. Kick Assembler is a unique combination of a very good macro assembler and a scripting language.

I feel obliged to spit out an example of this powerful stuff. And when you see the power of scripting combined with assembler on a single source file, I believe you will never look back. This code below is the mandelbrot example that is in the zip file. 
It calculates the mandelbrot set and fills character memory accordingly

.pc = $0400
.function toRe(i) .return -2+2.7*[i-floor(i/40)*40]/39
.function toIm(i) .return -1.6+3.2*floor(i/40)/24
.function mandelbroot(re,im) {
.var zr = 0
.var zi = 0
.var iter=0
.for(;[zr*zr+zi*zi]<4 && iter<20;iter++) {
.var newZr = zr*zr-zi*zi + re
.var newZi = 2*zr*zi + im
.eval zr = newZr
.eval zi = newZi
}
.var colors = List().add($20,$0f,$20,$08)
.return colors.get(iter&3)
}
.fill 25*40,mandelbroot(toRe(i),toIm(i)) 

Edit: Kick Assembler now support user defines pseudo commands (Yeeeeaay! 16 bit operations with one opcode!) and DTV specific opcodes.

Impressive isn't it? Here are the links if I convinced you: 

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Commodore 1541 Floppy Rom Commented Disassembly

This should come in handy for programming the 1541 drive. It is fully commented and jmp's are crosslinked. Nice job by Frank Kontros.

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