Commodore 128 + Power Assembler v10

[HonestFlames]

I'm trying to put together a nice little dev environment for the 128 but I'm bumping into what appears to be either outdated or just plain wrong documentation for Power Assembler.

The documentation I found is heavily biased to using Power Asm via its BASIC editor, with only a couple of pages dedicated to its own full-screen ASCII editor.

The format and syntax seems to differ. e.g.

BORDER = $d020 Generates an error at assembly time, despite this being shown as the correct format to assign a value to a label.

The pseudo-op '.MEM' is also not recognised, contrary to advice in the documentation.



Is there something I'm missing or, better still, is there an assembler for the 128 that has a similar syntax to Devpac and a decent full-screen editor environment, with auto-indentation etc?

If I have to write one, I will, but it will be very slow going!

 

[davideo]

Some assemblers require a space before the label - this may not be the case with this one but could be worth trying.

Dave G

 

[HonestFlames]

Argh!

It's so precious about syntax.

Instead of .ORG, it has to be .org (or you can use e.g. *=$c000).

Assigning values to labels requires that there is a space before the equals sign, but you don't need a space after the equals sign.

Nothing can be in upper-case, which is ridiculous because launching into EBUD puts you into lower-case, which makes you think it is going to be clever enough to understand that upper-case labels are a good idea.

I haven't managed to run the resulting assembly. Made the most simple program (change border colour to black).

Every time I SYS into it, it does a soft reset (aka run/stop+restore).

I will spend more time on this tomorrow.

 

[davideo]

Put a delay loop at the end of your routine. This way you may see what it is doing before it resets.

Dave G

 

[Hewitson]

Just tried this software, it really is one of the most poorly designed programs I've ever seen. Unfortunately I'm not aware of anything better for the 128.

Regardless, instead of a delay loop you could also wait for a key:

waitkey jsr $ffe4
beq waitkey
rts