On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 12:36:26AM -0500, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Hey everyone.
Trying to teach myself Apple II assembly. I have NO experience at this. All I ever learned was LOGO in elementary school and AppleSoft (Microsoft) BASIC in middle school. (I'm not counting a very small amount of LISP in college and mastery of HTML 4 which isn't programming.)
Everyone said to get the book Assembly Lines. I got the PDF of the original version.
Hit a glitch almost immediately. After doing CALL -151 to enter the monitor, it says to type F666G to enter the mini-assembler, and then "The prompt should change to an exclamation mark."
It doesn't change to an exclamation mark. It just goes back to the asterisk.
What's happening?
Same behavior in LinApple (Linux Apple II emulator) as on my Platinum.
This all sounded familiar, so I consulted my old blog entries from my port of Fahrfall to the Apple II: http://retrotinker.blogspot.com/2015/01/out-of-gate.html 'Varies By Model Not all Apple II machines are the same! I knew that, of course. But I did not appreciate just how much variation there is even among similar models. What illustrated this for me was trying to run the Apple II mini-assembler. "Assembly Lines: The Complete Book" describes starting the mini-assembler by typing "F666G" from the monitor prompt. Unfortunately, this simply didn't work. I was under the impression that the Apple IIe included the mini-assembler in its ROM. But deeper research uncovered that this was only true for the "Enhanced IIe" models. Closer inspection revealed that my IIe was in fact a non-enhanced model. My research also indicated that the mini-assembler _is_ included in the ROM for the Apple IIc. I swapped the IIe in my setup for a IIc, but "F666G" still didn't work! Again I consulted the Google, eventually showing that in the later ROMs (like the IIc and the Enhanced IIe) the mini-assembler is entered by typing "!" at the monitor prompt (rather than "F666G"). After toying with the mini-assembler, I returned the IIe to my setup mostly because the Super Serial card in the IIe does not require setting the baud rate after every "IN #2" command. The mini-assembler is useful, but significant coding will require a real assembler.' Hth? John -- John W. Linville Someday the world will need a hero, and you linville@tuxdriver.com might be all we have. Be ready.