xasm is a free tool for programming Atari 8-bit family computers.

History

First version of xasm was written in 1998. I needed a cross-assembler that could understand the syntax of Quick Assembler which I used for 8-bit Atari programming before I got a PC. Initially xasm supported the syntax of QA and nothing more. I quickly realized that I could extend the syntax to make it more expressive. This led to xasm 2.0, still in 1998. I added some more features next year. In 2002 I released many versions which contained mostly bugfixes. In 2005 there were some minor enhancements and bug fixes, as well as the whole assembler was rewritten from the x86 assembly language it was initially written in to the D programming language. Current version 3.0.2 was released 17th October 2009.

Syntax

6502 assembler code is usually full of LDA, STA, LDA, STA sequences. With xasm you can use MVA as a shortcut for LDA/STA pair or even MWA for 16-bit transfers. You can avoid defining labels when you need short jumps, thanks to conditional skip and repeat pseudo-instructions. You can put two instructions that share their argument in one line. These are just some of the features that help you program in a more concise way. Let’s look at typical 6502 code (which is also valid in xasm):

        lda #<dest
        sta ptr
        lda #>dest
        sta ptr+1
        ldx #192
do_line
        ldy #39
do_byte
        lda pattern,y
        sta (ptr),y
        dey
        bpl do_byte
        lda #40
        clc
        adc ptr
        sta ptr
        bcc skip
        inc ptr+1
skip
        dex
        bne do_line

Using xasm’s features this code can be rewritten to:

        mwa     #dest ptr
        ldx     #192
do_line
        ldy     #39
        mva:rpl pattern,y (ptr),y-
        lda #40
        add:sta ptr
        scc:inc ptr+1
        dex:bne do_line

Usage

xasm is a command-line tool. Therefore you additionally need a programmer’s text editor.

I use SciTE. Syntax highlighting definition for it is included with xasm. To install it, copy xasm.properties to the SciTE directory, select Options / Open Global Options File, type import xasm at the end and save the global configuration file.

xasm code in SciTE

Download

For other systems, such as GNU/Linux and MacOS X, install a D 1.x compiler and compile xasm from source code.

Inflate

Do you need a good decompression routine for 6502? See my inflate routine.

Links