Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 09:19:09 GMT From: Harry Elam To: CALC-TI@LISTS.PPP.TI.COM Subject: Re: Assemblers for z80 (ti-83) TASM and Z80 Assembly Language for the TI-83 TASM works very well as a TI-83 assembler, provided a few basic steps are taken. 1. Eliminate all non-printable characters from all source documents. TI's INC files include form feed characters (ASCII 12 or x0C) that should be removed. 2. TASM expects all assembler directives (.equ, .org, .ds, .end) to begin with a period. It is best to follow this convention in your own code. However, TI's INC files contain many .equ directives without the period, in both upper and lower case. Rather than change them all, use #define to accept them. In order to avoid any errors arising from the INC files, your assembly language source code files should begin as follows: .NOLIST #define equ .equ #define EQU .equ #define end .end #include "ti83asm.inc" #include "tokens.inc" .LIST ;Insert your own .equ directives here .org 9327h 3. Remove leading periods (..) from all label names. Labels may appear on the line above the statement to which they refer if they are followed by a colon, which is the standard line continuation character. 4. Labels must begin in column 1. Operands must not begin in column 1. 5. Make sure all label names are unique. 6. End the source file with the .end directive. 7. Assemble using the -i option (ignore case) to accept both upper and lower case statements in the INC files. It is convenient to assemble using a one line batch file like the following: tasm -t80 -i -o20 -p60 %1 If this file is named asm.bat, it can be called with a command like: asm myfile.asm This will produce a listing file, myfile.lst, containing 60 lines per page, and, if there are no errors, and object file, myfile.obj, containing 64 bytes of object code, equal to 32 (x020) bytes of machine code, per line. 8. Manually delete the colon (:) and the next eight characters from the beginning of each line, as well as the last two characters of each line, leaving only the actual object code. If you compiled with the -o20 option, each line except the last should now contain 64 alphanumeric characters of hex code. 9. Copy the edited object file into the TI-GRAPH LINK program editor. Add the following three lines: End 0000 End 10. Save the file, send it to the TI-83, and run it. Harry