MONster 6502 full IDE and Debugger on FE3

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Mike
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MONster 6502 full IDE and Debugger on FE3

Post by Mike »

https://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bu ... 6&start=20
in another thread, Wilson wrote:I've been working on my own assembler [...]
That seems to be MONster, which Bryce hosts on github:
Wilson wrote:MONster is an all-in-one editor/assembler/debugger for the Commodore Vic-20. The design philosophy is uncompromising maximalism. This is the polar opposite of most existing Vic-20 assemblers, which, though impressive in their own right, are mostly designed with memory efficiency in mind. Virtually any feature that I deem valuable in an editor/assembler is included.

[...]

For now MONster requires a Final Expansion to function. It could easily be modified for other 512k+ carts. Much of this RAM is used to store the multiple source code buffers (up to eight), but it is also used to store debug info and some code.

The banked memory allows the user program to execute in almost complete isolation. This means that, although this environment consumes a vast amount of memory itself, everything except address $9c02 (the bank select register) is preserved when control moves between the editor and the user program. Moreso even than small monitor cartridges, the program itself is virtually unaware of the resident tooling.
I just happened to stumble across that project a few days ago and already spent considerable time on one evening to do my first steps in it (with the FE3 emulated in VICE). I could successfully assemble the "Hello World" program and run it. :)

Bryce, any chance you want to comment on this? :wink:

I already have a question regarding the keyboard layout of the text editor: as the text you process seems to be encoded as 7-bit ASCII, is it possible you support the keyboard layout I devised some time ago for MG TEXT EDIT?

Code: Select all

          backslash  \   92  Pound
              caret  ^   94  Arrow Up
         underscore  _   95  Shift Minus
       grave accent  `   96  Arrow Left
 curly bracket open  {  123  Shift @
       vertical bar  |  124  Shift Pound
curly bracket close  }  125  Shift *
              tilde  ~  126  Shift Arrow Left
(you seem to use Arrow-Left as ESC key ... perhaps the STOP key could serve the same purpose instead?)

I wrote a driver that does this keyboard mapping and already does upper/lower-case letters right, here:

https://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bu ... 91&start=4

When working with VICE VDrive (TDE off, Virtual Device traps on) in a PC directory, I encountered some problems when trying to save texts, an empty file is opened but the editor just writes "SAVING..." and then locks. I'll try to understand what is the issue here to give you a more qualified bug report.

Greetings,

Michael
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Wilson
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Re: MONster 6502 full IDE and Debugger on FE3

Post by Wilson »

Aha, I've been found! :mrgreen:

Yes, this has been a "little" project of mine for quite a while. The veritable embodiment of scope creep. As its name implies, this project originated as a symbolic monitor, then a TASM (or VASM) like editor/assembler. The RAM requirements kept growing, and when I broke the 32K barrier, I guess it felt like I had to find a use for it all hehe

At this point, I'm mostly done adding features and primarily working on stability and bugfixes. To be honest, there's a lot of work left to do there. There are also a quite a few things that do work, but which I'd like to reimplement a little better.
Assembly was probably a bold choice for this, in hindsight, but making it has been for my own joy as much as anything :D
Mike wrote:I already have a question regarding the keyboard layout of the text editor: as the text you process seems to be encoded as 7-bit ASCII, is it possible you support the keyboard layout I devised some time ago for MG TEXT EDIT?
Ah, definitely! Should be easy to support those characters.
Mike wrote:When working with VICE VDrive (TDE off, Virtual Device traps on) in a PC directory, I encountered some problems when trying to save texts, an empty file is opened but the editor just writes "SAVING..." and then locks. I'll try to understand what is the issue here to give you a more qualified bug report.
Very believable. I haven't made any effort to test VDrive yet. I use a SD2IEC for testing on real hardware and try to test with TDE to make sure its 1541 compatible. But I'm just using the KERNAL I/O routines (maybe a little jankily), so it should be attainable.

Thanks for the spotlight- I might as well post some updates now that the cat is out of the bag ;)
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