d6b@psuecl.bitnet (09/22/90)
I've been using Macro68 for over a week now, so it's time to comment... (Macro68 is a new assembler from Digisoft/The Puzzle Factory). First, I love it!!! Previously I've been using the old standby, Metacomco, and more recently, CAPE...this is a tremendous improvement!!! It takes only about 6 seconds (including reading/writing from my s-l-o-w harddrive) on my 68000 Amiga to assemble a reasonably sized program (roughly 80Kbytes)...with ALL Amiga symbols (i.e. includes and library offsets) available...which brings me to the point I like best: resident, preassembled includes that add literally NO time to the assembly (or so close to zero I don't notice it). So you can include EVERY include EVER created with every program and never have to worry about the stupid things ever again!! In fact, once you set up a macro68.config file, your source text doesn't need any 'overhead' at all (normally at least one include statement is neccessary). Obviously this saves *tremendous* hassle and wasted time. Oh, there are lots more features: 010/020/030/040 support (it's being used by at least one Amiga hardware company to port Motorola's software emulation of transendental functions for the '040) including the new syntax, unusually powerful macros, user-friendly local labels, AREXX support (for interfacing with CygnusEd, for example), reentrant operation, and a very, very nice profiler (which even includes source code) written by Glenn McDiarmid (author of ReSource & ReSource'030... very sorry if I misspelled your name). Glenn is famous (to say the least) for optimizing other people's code, so it's not too surprising that the profiler is great. One last note: Macro68 is also very customizable, including such things as directives, instruction mneumonics, error messages, and so forth. A word about the new Motorola syntax: it's not as scary as you think. For example, move.l 8(a7),d0 becomes move.l (8,a7),d0 . People familiar with the IBM world (ick) will recognize this as one of the differences between TASM's QUIRKS mode and its IDEAL mode. Personally, I'd rather use an ideal assembler than a quirky one. :-) (By the way, they supply a program to automatically convert an old syntax program to the new syntax). So, do I like it? YES!!!! If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, or contact Digisoft or The Puzzle Factory directly (but please note that I am not associated with either of the two). -- Dan Babcock