Oh Happy Day - First Step into Programming Worked

[yorgle]

Just had to shout and crow and say thanks to all who have posted here. I just made my first modification to a program using DASM and it worked. (ok, all I did was move the chalice in Adventure to the top of the Yellow castle, but hey, it's a start).

[vdub_bobby]

Congrats! Have fun!

[Bucket]

You're alraedy doing better than I am. I'm still trying to figure out why 2600IDE can't parse the line "processor 6502".

[SeaGtGruff]

You're alraedy doing better than I am. I'm still trying to figure out why 2600IDE can't parse the line "processor 6502".

If by "2600IDE" you mean the editor that "Attendo" (Jacco Mintjes) wrote for batari BASIC, you don't want to include a "processor 6502" line in your programs-- at least, not if you're compiling them with batari BASIC. If you want to use 2600IDE to edit, compile, and run programs for the 2600-- without using batari BASIC (i.e., in "pure assembly")-- then you will need to modify the "2600baside.bat" file that 2600IDE uses for compiling. Basically, you can edit the "2600baside.bat" file so it looks more or less like the following:

 

dasm %1 -f3 -o%1.bin

 

This assumes that the DASM assembler is in the current directory, so you might want to modify that command line for your particular setup. And if you change the "2600baside.bat" file that way so you can use 2600IDE to successfully edit/compile/run assembly code, then you'll no longer be able to compile batari BASIC programs with 2600IDE-- unless you set things up to let you run 2600IDE with one "2600baside.bat" file when you want to work in assembly, and with another "2600baside.bat" file when you want to work in batari BASIC.

 

Michael Rideout

[nmoog]

I don't know what that IDE is, but in notepad I had the same thing until I realised that I needed a tab (or space) before the start of a line, else it thought I was trying to make a label. I guess it thought it was a label called Processor, then cried when it hit 6502 on the same line.

[SeaGtGruff]

I don't know what that IDE is, but in notepad I had the same thing until I realised that I needed a tab (or space) before the start of a line, else it thought I was trying to make a label. I guess it thought it was a label called Processor, then cried when it hit 6502 on the same line.

Yes, that's a good point. I had the same problem when I started learning Atari 2600 programming a couple of years ago!

 

2600IDE was created specifically for use with batari BASIC. Of course, that doesn't mean you can't use it for editing/compiling other languages-- like straight 6502/6507 assembly code-- but 2600IDE uses a batch that's geared toward compiling batari BASIC programs. Essentially, the batch passes the source code to batari BASIC first, which converts the batari BASIC code into assembly code, then the batch passes the assembly code to DASM, which assembles it into a ROM image. So I made a guess that perhaps "Bucket" is trying to use 2600IDE to compile straight assembly code, in which case the batch file is sending the code to batari BASIC first, which doesn't like the "processor 6502" command. If that's the case, then modifying the batch file so it bypasses batari BASIC, and just sends the source code directly to DASM for assembling, should do the trick.

 

Michael Rideout

[+SpiceWare]

You might like to try jEdit, the syntax coloring is really nice. I've also found split screen to help a lot. The splits can be different files, or even the same file which can be very helpful when comparing different sections of your program. Here I'm working on Medieval Mayhem with a 3-way split:

 

 

 

Here's the jEdit entries in my blog, where you can find the MODE file I made that you'll need for Atari 2600 syntax coloring.

Edited May 28, 2006 by SpiceWare

[Bucket]

Looks nice-- is there a WinXP version? Also, how is Crimson Editor?

[+SpiceWare]

jEdit is a Java app, so it should run under XP. I've run it without any problems on my Mac (OS X) and Thinkpad( Kubuntu Linux).

 

I'm not familiar with Crimson Editor, though it looks kinda like jEdit. I don't see an ASM 6502 syntax file for it though, so you'd have to make your own.