Z80 Assemblers on Mac
Tonight's 8-bit activity involves building a Z80 assembler on the Mac. I found an assembler called Z80-ASM on a page at the University of Bielefeld. The problem is it doesn't compile. I found a newer project at GNU, but I can't get it to compile. To start I need to Autoconf, Automake and all that jazz. Maybe another day.
I did several things to get the assembler to compile (on Mac OS X/Catalina/Intel):
- Use GCC instead of the Xcode compiler. GCC can be installed easily using Homebrew. Two of the Makefiles need editing to set the path.
- One of the CPU pin names duplicates a definition. I renamed it.
- Fixed the path to the manual pages
- Inserted an error function into lcd-display
I'm still testing this, but the test suite of programs build... mostly. I built each one with z80-asm and compared with what is provided in the source code.
chris@YeOldeComputer% sh test.sh clock.asm MD5 (clock.z80) = a9ed9d5409fc1e925a650c7217e50992 MD5 (out) = a9ed9d5409fc1e925a650c7217e50992 example.asm MD5 (example.z80) = 12880569a1cbbd17069fb4ce303e86d3 MD5 (out) = 12880569a1cbbd17069fb4ce303e86d3 multi.asm MD5 (multi.z80) = 382cd8d72fef5d57dfb9d3e0153b161e MD5 (out) = 382cd8d72fef5d57dfb9d3e0153b161e timer.asm MD5 (timer.z80) = 488d14f31c29038f89c99fd9f9bf9a49 MD5 (out) = 488d14f31c29038f89c99fd9f9bf9a49 lcd_test.asm MD5 (lcd_test.z80) = b68d1296e19934a442ac074d215f22b2 MD5 (out) = b68d1296e19934a442ac074d215f22b2
The tests divi, ti86_link2 and wait_tics are not correct. The first two don't build properly (see below). The wait_tics file builds differently - I think it is due to labels having different values, but more testing is required.
chris@YeOldeComputer% z80-asm divi.asm JP (IX) line 475: Invalid argument. No code generated chris@YeOldeComputer% z80-asm ti86_link2.asm cp %00000010 ;check bit 1 (the White wire) line 45: Missing Operand. No code generated
The source code can be downloaded from the website and here is my patch. Or alternatively I'm tinkering on Github. Binaries for Catalina/Intel are here (N.B. the directory says Big Sur - I was tired. They do run on Big Sur as well, but you will need verify them on Big Sur. Use at your own risk.)
Z80-ASM is available under the GNU public license v2. The pictures of the Z80 is used under a CC license and are sourced from Wikipedia.