Re: [stella] DASM 'upgrade' in progress

Subject: Re: [stella] DASM 'upgrade' in progress
From: "Andrew Davie" <atari2600@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 103 18:12:18 CST
>First, thank you very much for taking ownership of DASM.  This is a great 
>service to all us homebrewers!

Let's thank Matt Dillon for allowing us to do this and for writing the assembler in the first place.  It's not as crappy as I first thought :)

>Perhaps you could add some keyword that would cause the number of bytes left 
>in a page (or other range) or before the next org statement to print in the 
>output.  Joe Grand had a nice little trick for this in SCSIcide, which I 
>"appropriated" for Euchre.  :)


I was thinking already of keeping track of bytes skipped when you do an "ALIGN" statement.  Perhaps eventually it would be nice to have some sort of memory map output, which lists addresses for everything, and what space is unused.  A nice cross-reference would be great, too.  But that's a bit in the future.

>Make the Reason and Reasoncode displays a little more friendly - text as well 
>as numbers.

I'll try and make this side of things much easier to eyeball problems with.

>Here's a "pie-in-the-sky" request, and it's inspired by your "overlay" 
>technique.  :)  It would be very helpful to be able to set aside sections of 
>code that can only refer to certain identifiers and not others.  For 
>instance, I had one overlay group for naming trump and one for playing out a 
>hand.  I needed to be sure not to reference variables from one group in the 
>wrong segment of code.  Further, it might reveal cases in which a variable 
>needs to move out of an overlay into a global area.  (One of the last bugs in 
>Euchre was due to this - I thought I needed a variable only in certain 
>sections, but actually needed it beyond then.)


OK, I understand that request.  Essentially you want a local-variable scope.  I'll have a think about how this could/should be done.  Perhaps there's a good way to do it with existing code, anyway (for eg: defining the sections in separate files, and only exporting symbols which should be global).

Ta for the suggestions - I'm noting all of them down.

Cheers
A

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