Programming under Unix-like operating systems
Here are the different tools at your disposal:
Contents
Emulators
- TilEm [1]
- VTI (with Wine)
Syntax coloring
- there is a file that enables syntax highlighting for z80 asm for Kwrite and Kate here. You have to put it in /usr/share/apps/katepart/syntax.
- some editors have an "assembler" syntax coloring that fits quite well (like scite).
- Z80 Assembly IDE (Latest version and forums are here) has simple syntax coloring.
Assembling
SPASM
Author: Spencer Putt
Home Page: http://www.revsoft.org/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=21
SPASM is a portable Z80 assembler released under the GPL. Its distinguishing features are extremely fast assembly and powerful macro support. The output is only available in binary form, however with the use of Wabbitsign, written by James Montelongo and Spencer Putt, it can easily be converted to any desired program type.
assembler foo.asm foo.bin wabbit foo.bin foo.8xp
tpasm
Author: Todd Squires
Home page: http://www.sqrt.com/
tpasm is a Free (GPL) assembler which supports the Z80 as well as the 6805, 6809, 68HC11, 6502, Sunplus, 8051, PIC, and AVR. It uses syntax very similar to ZMASM.
tpasm 1.2 does not support binary file output, but you can use objcopy (from the GNU binutils package) to convert its Intel Hex output into binary; e.g.
tpasm foo.asm -o intel foo.hex -l foo.lst objcopy -I ihex foo.hex -O binary foo.bin
ASxxxx
Author: Alan R. Baldwin
Home page: http://shop-pdp.kent.edu/ashtml/asxxxx.htm
ASxxxx is a freeware assembler which supports the Z80 along with a large variety of other processors. It more closely resembles a modern PC assembler than a typical Z80 assembler, as it assembles each file into a relocatable object format which can then be linked with other files to produce the complete program. The linking is done by a separate program called ASlink (included with the package.)
To assemble and link a simple program you might do something like
asz80 -plogff foo.asm aslink -u -b _CODE=0x9D95 -i foo.ihx foo.rel objcopy -I ihex foo.ihx -O binary foo.bin
Note that the syntax is rather different from that of most Z80 assemblers. The important differences are
- Immediate values are marked with #.
- Indexed memory access is written as N(ix) rather than (ix+N).
- Constants are written differently: 0xAA, 0hAA, or $$AA for hexadecimal; 0o252, 0q252, or $&252 for octal; 0b10101010 or $%10101010 for binary.
For example,
ld hl,#str_hello add a,3(ix) xor #0x0f
There is also a modified version of ASxxxx distributed with the Small Device C Compiler. This version is, if anything, more confusing to use due to the poorly-documented changes made by the SDCC team.
TASM
Author: Thomas N. Anderson
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~tasm/
TASM is a shareware assembler which also supports a variety of processors.
There are several ways that you can use tasm under Linux:
- The TASM 3.1 for Linux shareware release is still in the wild. To use this you will need to enable "a.out" support in your kernel (it may be available as the module binfmt_aout.) You will also need to obtain the ancient Linux libc version 4 (not glibc) which can be found here.
- You can use TASM 3.2 for Windows with Wine.
- You can pay the $40 and compile it yourself on the platform of your choice.
Brass
Author: benryves
Home page http://benryves.com/bin/brass/
Brass runs under Linux thanks to Mono.
Sending programs to the calc
- TILP
- titranz : commandline tool, only works for TI-83/TI-83+