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BASM

BASM

Benediction ASsembler (BASM in short) is a modern Z80 assembler. He has taken its inspiration from various Z80 assembler (Maxam/Winape, sjasmplus, rasm, vasm, BRASS, glass, zasm) as well as assemblers from other platforms (asm11, sarcasm). It is tailored for Amstrad CPC demomaking and has been successfully used to develop the Amstrad CPC demo Can Robots Take Control?. It has been still improved since and will serve for futur productions too.

The documentation is quite minimal at the moment, but included example code should be still valid and assembled propetly. The user base being quite small, lots of bugs can remain. Do note hesitate to fill issues https://github.com/cpcsdk/rust.cpclib/issues or propose fixes.

Features of Interest

  • Possibility to assemble fake instructions (e.g. ld hl, de).
  • Possibility to use standard directives (e.g. incbin 'file.asm).
  • Rare directives and functions (e.g. ld a, opcode(xor a)).
  • Macros definition and usage (e.g. MY_MACRO_WITH_TWO_ARGS 1, "string").
  • Function definition and usage (e.g. db 5, my_function(3)).
  • Expressions able to handle numbers, strings, lists, matrices.
  • Handling of Amstrad CPC snapshots.
  • Possibility to execute directly the assembled project in the Amstrad CPC thanks to the M4/CPC WIFI card.
  • Multi-pass (in fact, BASM uses as many passes as needed).
  • Multiplatform (mainly tested on Linux and Windows).
  • Embedding of various ASM source files inside BASM that can be used by the users.
  • Possibility to write LOCOMOTIVE BASIC for easily writting Amstrad CPC bootstrap loaders.

Hello World

An hello world representative of the functionalities of BASM would be: 

    snainit "../cpclib-sna/src/cpc6128.sna" ; should be uneeded by properly specifying sna properties

    org 0x4000
    run $



    ld hl, text_content
loop
        ld a, (hl)
        or a
        jp z, finished

        call TXT_OUTPUT
        inc hl
        jp loop

finished
    jp $

text_content
    db "Hello, world!", 0
    include "inner://firmware/txtvdu.asm"

Download last version

Prefer to compile yourself basm. But you can still download latest versions here:

Failure

Continuous delivery system for Linux is broken. The executables are outdated of few years...

Differences with RASM

  • slower on the parsing side
  • more buggy because not enough tested ;)
  • MODULE directive must be closed by ENDMODULE
  • REPEAT counter is not accessible by using the variable counter but {counter} as in a MACRO
  • It is possible to name a MACRO using the label before the MACRO directive
  • More data types (list, matrix, int, float, boolean)
  • As basm can use an unlimited number of pass (warning there is not infinite loop check ATM), it can assemble code that would not be assembled with rasm because labels have to be known at this moment
  • Weak support of DSK``, no support ofTAPEand `CPR. HFE is usable on Linux with the appropriate compilation option. AMSDOS support is buggy ATM
  • SNA should be ok
  • Possibility to add some BASIC tokens to create loaders that do not clear the screen when launched