[Coco] Fooling around with assembly in RS-DOS environment

[Mark McDougall]

On 11/04/2016 10:21 AM, Rich Carreiro wrote:

> I'm not a purist on this -- it does NOT have to be EDTASM
> running on the emulated CoCo (in fact, I'd probably prefer
> it wasn't, since I don't feel like dealing with 32-char line
> lengths and all-caps when programming).
>
> Are there any CoCo assemblers that can run in Windows
> or Linux that can create executables that a CoCo emulator
> can load and run?

At the end of the day, I prefer productivity over the "pure" experience 
of developing on the Coco, so for me cross-assembling is a no-brainer.

Personally, I use AS6809 which will produce a Coco .BIN file courtesy of 
contributions by our own Boisy Pitre. I use my favourite editor (70 
lines of text) and it's all command-line driven so a makefile does all 
the building.

For testing/debugging I use MESS which, despite claims I don't 
understand, is far more powerful than any other Coco-based debugger 
could ever hope to be (eg. watchpoints), and gives you more information 
to boot. I've used it for both reverse-engineering and developing 
software on all sorts of platforms, not just Coco. It's invaluable in my 
arsenal.

In my personal opinion, integrated IDE's that supposedly make your life 
easier are of very limited benefit to a seasoned developer, regardless 
of platform. Pressing <UP><UP><ENTER> twice, once to build and once to 
run MESS is not exactly taxing, and ultimately more flexible and 
customisable.

It's doubly true in my case, because I develop for multiple retro 
platforms, and use the ASXXXX assemblers for all of them. My entire 
development environment is identical then for each of them, which is a 
definite productivity boost.

I'm sure plenty disagree, and you may even be one of them.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall              | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug> |   with less resistance!"