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:
Popularity: 35% [?]
Thankyou so much for putting me on to Kick. Its the mutts nuts! By the way your blog is excellent too, thanks for keeping it updated with such great info.