DASM/stella profiling tools?

[+Dave C]

Forgive me if I didn't RTFM enough on DASM or Stella. I am wondering if there are existing tools for analyzing 6502 assembly and suggesting optimizations. I didn't find anything obvious but I'm kind of guessing *something* exists...?

For example - I found a spot in some of my code where I loaded a register but never used its value in any way before reloading. Now maybe I might be using that for timing purposes but in this case it was just me blundering around changing things and losing track of what I was doing. It seems like something DASM - or Stella - would be able to call out though...

Similarly - unreachable code /data - locations in ROM that are initialized but never read during the run of a program. 

There are other situations - like - I have code that takes advantage of knowing for instance that y will happen to have value $ff and instead of doing a ldy #$0 it will do an iny to save a byte of code space. I'd like to set an inline assertion for Stella to break if that ever becomes untrue... that seems more like something that could be done with a little bit of build scripting...

[+Andrew Davie]

Well it is a lovely manual. Beautiful. But no, it has nothing about code analysis. there is a forum here though on 6502 tips and tricks.

Edited October 11, 2021 by Andrew Davie

[+Andrew Davie]

Sometimes I'm a bit of a tool. And I do optimisations, so there's that.

[+Dave C]

For sure I've been benefitting from the tips and tricks.