Close

A09 on OSX

A project log for 6809 SBC

A 6809-based SBC with DES encryption hardware.

philmacphailPhil.macphail 12/24/2020 at 14:353 Comments

I looked around for 6809 assemblers for OSX, and there were three main options; A09, AS9 and lwtools. lwtools was a bit more 'serious' than I was looking for and AS9 was quite complicated to get into a form Xcode could compile, so A09 was what I chose. It compiled without problem but generated lots of errors when used, so clearly something wasn't quite right. The comments at the start of the code are quite explicit in the expectations of int and long bit-widths, which the compiler on my Mac didn't satisfy. Converting ints to int_16t and similar for longs the code worked and I could assemble Assist09, program an EEPROM and run it on my simple PCB.

There is an error in the check-sum generation for the s-records, but that can wait for another day. The updated code is here

https://github.com/valgamaa/A09-cross-assembler

and I can now progress to my full design safe in the knowledge that I have a working version of Assist09 that I can modify for the new board to bring it to life.

Discussions

Phil.macphail wrote 03/31/2022 at 10:52 point

Hi Mike, thanks for spotting that. I gave it a try and it compiles nicely without problem. When I assembled a small program it worked, but assembling Assist09 gave lots of jump out of range errors. Assist09  does lots of things using vector tables that seem to be the problem, so I would expect it to work generally (and it is now the simplest 6809 assembler to get working on OSX).

  Are you sure? yes | no

Ken Yap wrote 03/30/2022 at 22:53 point

Another family of macro cross-assemblers which is very capable and used by SDCC is asxxxx: https://shop-pdp.net/ashtml/asxxxx.htm No explcit mention compilation under OS/X, and I don't see a subdirectory for OS/X support, the closest thing is Linux, but it only requires ANSI-C. Also not known is whether the assembler syntax supported is suitable for the code you have.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Mike wrote 03/30/2022 at 22:06 point

Hey Apple Mac users interested in A09, the 6809 ASM compiler. Know that the maintainer has ported a Makefile for Macs in v1.5 (Sept'21); I was able to compile a09 straight out of the box and without munging data types. Simply:
    git clone https://github.com/Arakula/A09.git
    make
Joy. However, the Makefile alone is too simple; the difference between v1.44 and v.15 must be significant enough. Last, I have not tried to compile Flex nor load on Phil's board. This post is just FYI.

  Are you sure? yes | no