Anyone know the origins of "Editor Assembler" and "Star Raider"?

[Slor]

Does anyone here know the origins of these two label variations? Editor Assembler appears to be the same software as Assembler Editor (I need to check that again to confirm - it seems like there might have been one byte different when I compared them years ago) but labelled with the different name and no CXL part number. Also, Star Raider has the exact same part number, and appears to be the same software, as Star Raiders. I wrote the author a while back to see if he had any knowledge of the variation:

 

Hi James,

 

The name I came up with was "Star Raiders", with an 's'. I don't remember exactly where I got the name from. I remember making a page full of names and "Star Raiders" was everyone's favorite. Not sure what the deal is with "Star Raider", maybe someone made a typo?

 

Regards,

 

Doug

 

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 12:30 PM, James Wilkinson <jwilkinson43@comcast.net> wrote:

> I have, of course, the Star Raiders cartridge for my 8-bit computers.

> I also have one labelled "Star Raider", and I'm curious - was the

> first release simply mislabeled, or was the name actually changed at some point?

> In the back of my mind, I have this theory (certainly an incorrect

> one) that originally the player was considered to be the Star Raider,

> but in the end someone decided that sounded more like a type of bad

> guy, so it was thus pluralized Star Raiders in recognition of the

> baddies. Ok, so now that you've wasted 20 seconds of your life

> reading this, hopefully you can spare a few more for the answer.

>

> thanks

> James

>

>

 

So, I'm curious if anyone here has any further knowledge of these variations. Was Editor Assembler just an early release that was renamed? Was Star Raider a typo in the first release? Been curious about both of these for a while, so any insight would be appreciated.

 

thanks!

James

[Rybags]

My guess is it's an early release... Editor/Assembler was probably the more commonly used term for such programs, but IMO Assembler/Editor has a better ring to it.

 

Differences? The AsmEd has some pretty stupid bugs, so I don't think they were exactly strict on the QA. But, the ones I've discovered don't actually affect programming, they're more annoyances than anything.

 

e.g. some load errors in Edit mode will drop you into Debug and vice/versa.

And, in the debugger, if you happen to enter a command that is also a valid 6502 instruction, it'll cause an error, e.g:

 

DEC - you have to put a space in.

LDA - same... although you don't really tend to disassemble stuff down that low.

 

IIRC, AsmEd was written by a female programmer (at Atari?)

[+Larry]

Kathleen O'Brien, is credited as being the Asm/Ed author.

http://www.laughton.com/

 

My guess is it's an early release... Editor/Assembler was probably the more commonly used term for such programs, but IMO Assembler/Editor has a better ring to it.

 

Differences? The AsmEd has some pretty stupid bugs, so I don't think they were exactly strict on the QA. But, the ones I've discovered don't actually affect programming, they're more annoyances than anything.

 

e.g. some load errors in Edit mode will drop you into Debug and vice/versa.

And, in the debugger, if you happen to enter a command that is also a valid 6502 instruction, it'll cause an error, e.g:

 

DEC - you have to put a space in.

LDA - same... although you don't really tend to disassemble stuff down that low.

 

IIRC, AsmEd was written by a female programmer (at Atari?)