Atari Assembler Editor

Atari Assembler Editor
Original author(s) Kathleen O'Brien
Developer(s) Shepardson Microsystems
Initial release 1981 (1981)
Platform Atari 8-bit family
Size 8KB
Type Assembler
License Proprietary software

Atari Assembler Editor (sometimes written as Atari Assembler/Editor) is a cartridge-based development system used to edit, assemble, and debug 6502 programs for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. It was programmed by Kathleen O'Brien of Shepardson Microsystems; O'Brien later helped with Atari BASIC, and Assembler Editor shares many design concepts with that language.

Assembler Editor lacked many features, notably the ability to define macros to organize code, and the inability to link multiple modules together into a larger program. The later was especially limiting, as the amount of free memory available to hold source code on early machines was limited. The assembly/compiling times were also slow for anything but the smallest programs.

In the manual, Atari recommends the Assembler Editor as a tool for writing subroutines to speed up Atari BASIC.[1] The Atari Macro Assembler was offered by Atari to provide better performance and more powerful features, such as macros, but it was disk-based, copy-protected, and did not include an editor or debugger. Despite the recommendation, commercial software was written using the Assembler Editor, such as the game Eastern Front (1941).[2]

The source code to the original Assembler Editor was licensed to Optimized Systems Software, who introduced EASMD based on this code, and later introduced the greatly updated MAC/65. Problems with Assembler Editor also led to a thriving market for other 3rd party assemblers.

History

Creation

Assembler Editor was written by Kathleen O'Brien of Shepardson Microsystems. The company had been hired by Atari to help fit Microsoft 6502 BASIC onto an 8KB ROM, something the programmers at Atari were struggling with. Instead, Bill Wilkenson suggested designing an entirely new version of basic, which became Atari BASIC.[3]

While Atari BASIC was being written, primarily by Paul Laughton, O'Brien's husband, O'Brien worked on Assembler Editor.[3] Assembler Editor was written "by hand" by punching codes into a punch tape machine, running the tape through an EPROM burner, and then testing the resulting ROM in an Atari 800. The cartridge was completed before Atari BASIC, and O'Brien spent some time working on portions of that project as well.[3]

As part of Shepardson's work on the Atari, a number of common routines were copied into the Atari's operating system. These included the floating point routines, which O'Brien was tasked with writing, although she had not worked on such code before.[3] These routines were considered to be notoriously slow, a topic that Wilkenson often wrote about.[4]

Legacy

Shortly after Shepardson delivered Assembler Editor and Atari BASIC to Atari, Bob Shepardson, the owner, decided to return to being a one-person company.[5] O'Brien, Laughton and Wilkinson formed their own company, Optimized Systems Software (OSS), to continue development of the Atari products. They licensed the original source code for BASIC, Assembler Editor and Atari DOS, which they had collectively written.[6]

In 1981, OSS released an improved version of Assembler Editor known as EASMD, which was released on floppy disk. EASMD was later replaced by a further improved version, MAC/65, in 1982. In contrast to Assembler Editor, MAC/65 was one of the fastest assemblers on the platform.[7] Much of the improved performance of MAC/65 was due to it tokenizing the code as lines were entered; in Assembler Editor an instruction like LDA had to be read from memory and converted to the internal opcode every time it was encountered, in MAC/65 this occurred only once when the user pressed ↵ Enter.[8]

Assembler Editor continued to be available from Atari, and increased in popularity as the price dropped to US$10 or $5 in the latter half of the 1980s.[9]

3rd party assemblers

Problems with Assembler Editor and Macro Assembler led to a number of 3rd party assemblers for the platform, in addition to EASMD and MAC/65. Among these, SynAssembler from Synapse Software was the fastest, using the same tokenizing concept as MAC/65 to garner slightly more speed.[7] SynAssembler was a port of S-C Assembler II from the Apple II.[10]

Details

The Assembler Editor is two-pass 6502 assembler in an 8KB cartridge. Both source and object code can be in memory simultaneously, allowing repeated editing, assembly, and running of the resulting code without accessing a disk or tape drive.[8]

Edit

The cartridge starts in EDIT mode. The programmer enters lines of assembly source into the Atari BASIC-like editor. Source text must be prefixed with a line number, or it is interpreted as a command. Like Atari BASIC, Assembler Editor included an ENTER command that could be used to combine files together into a single larger program listing. Unlike Atari BASIC, Assembler Editor included a number of commands for automatically creating spaced-out line numbers, as well as renumbering lines and deleting them en masse. The editor also had a FIND command, which was very useful when working with labels.[11]

Instructions are listed in the order they will be placed in memory. The starting point for the instructions is specified with the *= instruction, so, for instance, code intended to be placed in the special "page six" would be prefixed with the line *= $0600.[12] Variable names could be assigned to point to specific locations, and this was often combined with an increment *= *+1 to directly encode offsets into tables.[13]

Values following instructions were normally interpreted as "the value at this memory address", but an actual numeric value could be provided as an "immediate operand" by appending it with a hash, like LDA #12, which loads the accumulator with the decimal value 12. Hexadecimal was indicated with a dollar sign, LDA #$12 would load the accumulator with 12 hex, or 18 decimal. Indirect addressing was supported using parentheses; LDA ($600) would use the values in location $600,$601 to produce a 16-bit address, and then load the accumulator with the value found at that location.[14]

Errors are reported with numeric error codes, with about 50 such codes in total.[15]

Assembling

Code can be assembled at any time by typing the ASM command into the editor.[16]

Assembler Editor was widely derided as the slowest assembler on the platform. Much of this was due to it sharing much of the editor code with Atari BASIC, which had also been written by Shepardson Microsystems. Atari BASIC was notorious for the very slow routines used to convert numerical constants in code into an internal representation, which used binary coded decimal (BCD) routines in the Atari's operating system. This meant that all numbers, even line numbers, had to be converted to BCD. Oddly, it also meant that 1E2 was a legal line number.[7]

Debug

The debugger, really a monitor, is entered with the BUG command.[17] The X command returns to EDIT mode.[18] The debugger allows the viewing and changing of registers and memory locations, code tracing, single-step and disassembly.[19]

Example Code

The following is example code for Hello World! written in Atari assembly language:

10 ; HELLO.ASM
20 ; ---------
30 ;
40 ; THIS ATARI ASSEMBLY PROGRAM
50 ; WILL PRINT THE "HELLO WORLD"
60 ; MESSAGE TO THE SCREEN
70 ;
0100 ; CIO EQUATES
0110 ; ===========
0120     *=  $0340   ;START OF IOCB
0130 IOCB
0140 ;
0150 ICHID *= *+1    ;DEVICE HANDLER
0160 ICDNO *= *+1    ;DEVICE NUMBER
0170 ICCOM *= *+1    ;I/O COMMAND
0180 ICSTA *= *+1    ;I/O STATUS
0190 ICBAL *= *+1    ;LSB BUFFER ADDR
0200 ICBAH *= *+1    ;MSB BUFFER ADDR
0210 ICPTL *= *+1    ;LSB PUT ROUTINE
0220 ICPTH *= *+1    ;MSB PUT ROUTINE
0230 ICBLL *= *+1    ;LSB BUFFER LEN
0240 ICBLH *= *+1    ;MSB BUFFER LEN
0250 ICAX1 *= *+1    ;AUX BYTE 1
0260 ICAX2 *= *+1    ;AUX BYTE 1
0270 ;
0280 GETREC = 5      ;GET TEXT RECORD
0290 PUTREC = 9      ;PUT TEXT RECORD
0300 ;
0310 CIOV =  $E456   ;CIO ENTRY VECTOR
0320 RUNAD = $02E0   ;RUN ADDRESS
0330 EOL   = $9B     ;END OF LINE
0340 ;
0350 ; SETUP FOR CIO
0360 ; -------------
0370     *= $0600
0380 START LDX #0    ;IOCB 0
0390     LDA #PUTREC ;WANT OUTPUT
0400     STA ICCOM,X ;ISSUE CMD
0410     LDA #MSG&255 ;LOW BYTE OF MSG
0420     STA ICBAL,X ; INTO ICBAL
0430     LDA #MSG/256 ;HIGH BYTE
0440     STA ICBAH,X ; INTO ICBAH
0450     LDA #0      ;LENGTH OF MSG
0460     STA ICBLH,X ; HIGH BYTE
0470     LDA #$FF    ;255 CHAR LENGTH
0480     STA ICBLL,X ; LOW BYTE
0490 ;
0500 ; CALL CIO TO PRINT
0510 ; -----------------
0520     JSR CIOV    ;CALL CIO
0530     RTS         ;EXIT TO DOS
0540 ;
0550 ; OUR MESSAGE
0560 ; -----------
0570 MSG .BYTE "HELLO WORLD!",EOL
0580 ;
0590 ; INIT RUN ADDRESS
0600 ; ----------------
0610     *=  RUNAD
0620     .WORD START
0630     .END

ASM
BUG
G600
X

References

Citations

  1. ↑ Manual 1981, p. 63.
  2. ↑ Crawford, Chris (1982). Source Code for Eastern Front (1941). The ATARI Program Exchange.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Interview 2015.
  4. ↑ Wilkinson, Bill (February 1985). "INSIGHT: Atari". Compute!. p. 139.
  5. ↑ Wilkinson 1982, p. vi.
  6. ↑ Wilkinson 1982, pp. vi-vii.
  7. 1 2 3 Wetmore 1983, p. 29.
  8. 1 2 Hague 2009.
  9. ↑ Ratcliff, Matthew (20 November 1989). "Atari Assembler Editor Reference".
  10. ↑ Dery, Adrian (9 September 2017). "Synapse Assembler 'SynAssembler' by Steve Hales". Missing or empty |url= (help)
  11. ↑ Manual 1981, p. 15.
  12. ↑ Manual 1981, p. 7,31.
  13. ↑ Manual 1981, p. 31.
  14. ↑ Manual 1981, pp. 10-12.
  15. ↑ Manual 1981, pp. 43-44.
  16. ↑ Manual 1981, p. 25.
  17. ↑ Manual 1981, p. 35.
  18. ↑ Manual 1981, p. 41.
  19. ↑ Manual 1981, pp. 35-41.

Bibliography

  • Atari Assembler Editor User Manual (PDF). Atari. 1981.
  • Hague, James (2 August 2009). "A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 1". Programming in the 21st Century.
  • Kathleen O'Brien, Kevin Savetz (13 March 2015). Kathleen O'Brien, OSS (Podcast).
  • Wetmore, Russ (November 1983). "Atari 8-bit assemblers reviewed". Hi-Res. Vol. 1 no. 1.
  • Wilkinson, Bill (1982). Inside Atari DOS. Optimized Systems Software,Inc. ISBN 0-942386-02-7. Retrieved 2009-04-04.
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