Mark Szeliga Szolkowski's Blog

Saturday, January 03, 2009

TommyGun IDE for the ZX Spectrum

I've not had chance to play properly with TommyGun but from what I have seen so far it looks very good.

Labels: assembly language, IDE, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, TommyGun, Z80

# posted by Mark @ 1/03/2009 07:34:00 pm 0 comments

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

RST 16 modifies the accumulator...

Aargh - it's taken me a depressing amount of time to realise that the RST16 call to print the contents of the accumulator on the ZX Spectrum has the side effect of modifying the contents of the accumulator. That'll explain why I was getting an "INVALID INK COLOUR" error message in BASIC...

Click on the images for larger versions - they're very exciting...

Labels: assembly language, RST 10, RST 16, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Z80

# posted by Mark @ 12/23/2008 10:28:00 pm 1 comments

Monday, December 22, 2008

Z80 machine code

It is a bit painful using ZEUS on my real ZX Spectrum, so today I got round to:

Installing jEdit on my Mac - started with Eclipse but got bored of trying to get the Z80 plug-in I'd found to work

Installing the pasmo compiler

Playing with Jonathan Cauldwell's 1K Kilopede game

I edited the catalog.xml file to ignore the current mapping for Intel x86 assembly files and instead associate with Z80 like this:

...


<MODE NAME="assembly-z80" FILE="assembly-z80.xml"
FILE_NAME_GLOB="*.asm" />
...

and then created a new XML file for the Z80 instructions by copying the x86 file and modifying it. It's not finished yet as it still contains lots of x86 instructions and not all Z80 ones, but it's a start.

Labels: jEdit, Jonathan Cauldwell, machine code, pasmo, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Z80

# posted by Mark @ 12/22/2008 06:21:00 pm 0 comments