Proposed Assembler Commands

[keith]

Do three pedants define a plain obtuse triangle?

Sure, but you gotta promise to hold up your corner. ;-)

 

[keith]

Yes, I think you are right. They may have been SOS ones. I know RCA made
them for some purpose way be then. They cost like the devil.

Yep, I think my cousin was on the RCA Voyager CPU team. It's been a
*long* time since I talked to him though. A search on "RCA 1802"
+ Voyager turns a bunch of hits.

 

[Ken Smith]

The *last* thing I want to do is program an editor. COnfiguring one is
bad enough. I don't much like making hammers and straightening nails
either. I've been using MED on Windows, and VE (though I don't like it) on
*IX for some time.

The two best editors ever made are "credit" by Intel and the Wordstar like
IDE one from Borland.

Credit has a move the cursor and type mode stuff and a command mode. The
command mode was simple yet very powerful. You could write complete
programs in the commands.

The Borland IDE is about the only one I've seen that does what it is told
about selecting text. Most other editors remove the selection on the
merest whim of the program.

 

[Rich Grise]

The two best editors ever made are "credit" by Intel and the Wordstar like
IDE one from Borland.

As a matter of fact, I used "credit" (CRt EDITor) on one of Intel's MDSs,
back in the days when the guy who got a couple of TMS2716 samples had to
guard them with his life. Of course, in the colleges, they were giving
away 8086's like popcorn. I'm almost sure the MDS (microprocessor
development system) was an industrialized 8080/S-100. I was working on
triple-redundant Naval Ordnance systems. (I had dropped out of college, to
get a _real_ education.)

And you've entirely ignored "Brief" - Basic Reconfigurable Interactive
Editing Facility - "the programmer's editor". It made WordHog look like
dBlimp.

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Ken Smith]

As a matter of fact, I used "credit" (CRt EDITor) on one of Intel's MDSs,
back in the days when the guy who got a couple of TMS2716 samples had to
guard them with his life. Of course, in the colleges, they were giving
away 8086's like popcorn. I'm almost sure the MDS (microprocessor
development system) was an industrialized 8080/S-100. I was working on
triple-redundant Naval Ordnance systems. (I had dropped out of college, to
get a _real_ education.)

The MDS-800 was a card cage which held "multibus" cards. It had room for
something like 10 cards. There was a row of switches on the front panel.
You could assert an interrupt with 8 of them. One of them swapped a chunk
of RAM space with some ROM to boot the machine.

Later came the "series 2". These were a combined terminal and "multibus"
rack. It had room for 4 boards mounted horizontally in the bottom. The
"series 2" machines had a design flaw where the current in some Molex
connectors was more than they could be trusted to handle. The connectors
were a cheap single wipe design in a white plactic housing. After a few
months of service they would become a zero wipe connector is a brown
plastic housing.

After the "series 2" came the "series 3". This was intended to develop
8086 code also. It was a "series 2" sitting on a box for 4 more multibus
cards. The new section had a 8086 card in it. It would also run ICE-86.

ICE-86 was an emulator for the 8086. It copied mostly the commands of
ICE-80. You could load the program into the RAM iside the ICE-86 and run
it on your target hardware. The load operation took (on my project) 4
hours[1] to load the code. If you loaded a small program and then
transfered the real code via a RS232 link it was much faster so that is
what we did.

[1] No kidding folks.

After the "series 3" came the "series 4" which led us to state that each
version is better than the next.

The operating system was something called ISIS. It was a more advanced
operating system than MSDOS was on the day the PC came out.

 

[John Larkin]

ICE-86 was an emulator for the 8086. It copied mostly the commands of
ICE-80. You could load the program into the RAM iside the ICE-86 and run
it on your target hardware. The load operation took (on my project) 4
hours[1] to load the code. If you loaded a small program and then
transfered the real code via a RS232 link it was much faster so that is
what we did.

[1] No kidding folks.

After the "series 3" came the "series 4" which led us to state that each
version is better than the next.

The operating system was something called ISIS. It was a more advanced
operating system than MSDOS was on the day the PC came out.

We just cross-assembled uP code on a DEC timeshare system (later, on a
PC) and ran a tiny "monitor" (hex loader/debug thing) on the target
itself. That was a lot more efficient than buying a monster
soon-to-be-obsolete ICEbox.

Nowadays we cross-assemble on a PC and test with a background debug
pod running off an ebay laptop. The whole chain costs about $600,
roughly $100 in 1972 dollars.

John

 

[Ken Smith]

We just cross-assembled uP code on a DEC timeshare system

We used timeshare to compile the 4040 code but when we went to 8080 we got
the MDS-800

(later, on a
PC) and ran a tiny "monitor" (hex loader/debug thing) on the target
itself. That was a lot more efficient than buying a monster
soon-to-be-obsolete ICEbox.

I now have a cute little trick designed into a 8051 project that does
hardware breakpointing on writes of given values to given locations.

The 8051 emulator we had would not work on a PCI machine and I didn't have
a ISA machine and there was some extra room in the CPLD.

Nowadays we cross-assemble on a PC and test with a background debug
pod running off an ebay laptop. The whole chain costs about $600,
roughly $100 in 1972 dollars.

The Cygnal processors have a built in breakpoint system. Too bad they
don't document the JTAG interface so you have to spend $100 on a debugger
that doesn't work very well.