Intelligent macro-matching, VS icon nicking

Thursday, 22nd December 2005

Brass has got a new macro preprocessor, that hopefully makes the work of people writing things like the macro-driven TI ASM API easier, and will generate less redundant code.
TASM only supports simple find-and-replace macros; so, for example:

#define draw_sprite(x,y,sprite) ld a,x\ ld b,y\ ld hl,sprite\ call put_sprite

draw_sprite(10,43,my_sprite)
; Generates the following:
 ld a,10
 ld b,43
 ld hl,my_sprite
 call put_sprite

draw_sprite(a,43,hl)
; Generates the following:
 ld a,a ; Rubbish!
 ld b,43
 ld hl,hl ; Not going to work...
 call put_sprite

Brass, however, supports more intelligent macros - like this example shows. It will switch between a variety of different macros, depending on the arguments passed in.

Latenite is still in development - nothing particularily visible, barring the new tooltips and worrying familiar icons.

Business with the Z80

Monday, 12th December 2005

I have been pretty busy with Brass and Latenite over the last few days - Latenite has had a few little adjustments/improvements/fixes, but also has a few new holes in it which means that it is unsuitable for release. I'm adding the ability to hook help files to projects rather than each project being loaded with every help file - this has the extra bonus that Brass will be able to compile help files straight from the source, which will then be reloaded on each build by Latenite.

I did something unheard of over the weekend as well - I read the SDK manual for the TI-83 Plus. Mainly because I was trying to work out how some of the function calls worked, but also the stuff they talk about with regards to applications (as opposed to programs - applications fill multiple 16KB pages of ROM on the calculator, programs are variable sizes and are copied to RAM location $9D93 for execution) was pretty interesting - and it sounds pretty nightmarish! I'll download some of the application development tools, see if I can puzzle them out and then try and recreate their behaviour in Brass. It's yet another output format - Brass can, with the .binarymode directive, switch between a number of binary output formats, including TI calculator formats (TI-73, TI-82, TI-83, TI-83+, TI-85, TI-86), raw binary and a number of hex text files (Intel, Intel word address, MOS technology and Motorola).

I'd never really understood how the LCD display driver worked on the TI-83 Plus, and the SDK documentation was pretty useful - even though I still can't quite work out why the X axis goes from top-to-bottom and the Y axis goes from left-to-right. It turns out direct access to the LCD can produce some very fast results... (and the world's worst greyscale):

Download binaries for TI-83/TI-83 Plus [Ion/MirageOS]

Yes, yes, I have a little 'something' about 3D tunnels.

It lives!

Monday, 5th December 2005

A public release of Brass has been released... it can assemble some rather nasty Z80 code (TASM macro-abusing code, that is!) fine. Hopefully people can start finding the parse errors, or just complain at the horrible colour scheme of the manual.

And why did nobody tell me you could access the LSB/MSB of IX/IY through IXL/IXH/IYL/IYH before?

@kwijibo: You can use a Latenite beta if you take this file then unzip this file on top of it. It is almost entirely data driven - all Z80 registers (that I knew about) and flags (likewise) are hard-coded (but not Z80 instructions).