time for me to learn assembly
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.
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 12:36 AM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> 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.
hmmm, I just tried it in the emulator too while running in ][+ mode and I get the same problem I started digging around, and saw that the MIni-Assembler is only available in the Integer BASIC Roms and not available in the Applesoft ROMs I'm trying to find out how this emulator is configured, and I can't see yet which ROMs are being used But it seems to be Applesoft ROMs So I switched back to Apple ][ mode this you may recall already boots up in Monitor mode So you don't need that BASIC command "CALL -151" You just enter "F666G" right on the command line and it works fine Dan
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 11:31 AM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
the MIni-Assembler is only available in the Integer BASIC Roms and not available in the Applesoft ROMs
Ah! That explains it. Thanks.
oh, I recalled how easy it was to distinguish which Roms are running in the emulator In case it's not apparent between Applesoft Basic or Integer Basic when looking inside the emulator I thought the display screen on the emulator would say "Applesoft Basic" at the top when you boot. But I have an excuse, its been a very long time since I tried Integer Basic So you just multiply 2 decimal numbers with the PRINT command at the prompt In Applesoft Basic, it will give you the answer in decimal In Integer Basic, it will give you a sytax error ---> Integer means _no_ decimal numbers [eg floating point] doh!
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.
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 10:58 AM, John W. Linville via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
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
tried it here too , I see that step works fine after switching the emulator to 'enhanced ][e' mode And the ][+ and ][e mode doesn't allow that step Also found some more info from digging around, on the hardware end, with the Applesoft machines they would install the 16K Ram card with the Integer Roms, and then load that to take advantage of the Mini-Assembler There were also some useful debugging commands in the Monitor, which were deleted when moving to Applesoft Basic, so that is all available again too. But I don't know yet which emulators are versatile enough to give you this option of switching Roms in the same machine. You might have to use the original Apple ][ mode for now for any assmebly programming Unless there are some specific features needed in the ][+ or ][e Dan
participants (3)
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Dan Roganti -
Evan Koblentz -
John W. Linville