pamoroso / suite8080

A suite of Intel 8080 Assembly tools

Paolo Amoroso

I’m an Italian astronomy and space popularizer, a Google expert, and a podcaster.

Being an astronomy and space nerd didn't improve my social skills as a kid. But it sure gave me breadth and depth in these fields. As a young man, unique experiences provided further insight. And my social skills got a little better, too.

Now I work in astronomy and space outreach and education. I’m also a member of the Google Product Experts program.

Programming

I’m no professional developer, just a hobby programmer.

I started playing with and programming computers in the early 1980s. This adventure led me to read about and experiment with many programming languages and environments, from Z-80 and MC-68000 Assembly to Lisp and Python.

Learn more

• blog: Paolo Amoroso's Journal @[email protected]
• Mastodon: @[email protected]

suite8080's Issues

More styles of numeric base notation?

The traditional way to write hex numbers in Intel assemblers is with the h suffix: AB12h, C8h.
However, there are many different ways to write such numbers; the one I'm most familiar with is the C-style 0x prefix: 0xAB12, 0xC8.

The Netwide Assembler accepts a whole 4 ways of annotating numbers as hex: C8h, $0C8, 0xC8 and 0hC8. Are there any plans to add such options here?

ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'FCB+32'

The following line gives the error in the title

FCBCR	EQU	FCB+32	;CURRENT RECORD LOCATION

FCB was defined in the previous line as

FCB	EQU	005CH	;DEFAULT FCB LOCATION

My guess would be that you do not expect an expression here.

String in DB argument cannot contain a comma

The code that splits the arguments for a DB directive blindly splits the string by commas, even if the comma is inside of a string:

suite8080/suite8080/asm80.py

Lines 1055 to 1063 in e6f5771

	def parse_db_arguments(string):
	"""Return a list of ``db`` arguments parsed from string.
	Split string into arguments, strip whitespace from them, and return a list of
	the resulting arguments.
	"""
	arguments = string.split(',')
	arguments = [argument.strip() for argument in arguments]
	return arguments

This means that declaring a string of text containing a comma can't be done directly:

; this will fail
text: DB 'Hello, World!'

As a workaround, the ASCII comma has the code 2C in hex, so you can split your string on that and insert it on its own.

; hacky workaround
text: DB 'Hello', 2Ch, ' World!'

Output a full memory dump from the assembler?

I would like to use the assembler program to write programs to run on an Intel8080-based computer emulator.
My emulator accepts 65536-byte files that are loaded into memory, with the top 2048 bytes occupied by the "operating system" and overwriting the first 2048 bytes of the dump.

The assembler program outputs files that are as large as needed to fit the assembled program and no larger.
The ORG pseudo-instruction only informs the calculation of label offsets, and does not create blank spaces in the resulting file.
If there is more than one ORG line, there is no separation between the parts where different ORGs apply.

How can I get 65536-sized files from the assembler that form the entire memory space of my emulator, so that I could write the code in the parts of memory I need, and not bother with the gaps?
I have already discovered the DS pseudo-instruction, which inserts a specified number of zero bytes, but then I'd have to count the number of bytes in my code to choose the appropriate number of padding bytes. I'd like to do it with an ORG syntax, especially since the I8080 Programmer's Guide says on page 40 that DS and ORG can be used for similar purposes.