Little changes, big impact !!

Ofcourse, development of ASM-One continues (allthough maybe not as fast or
regular as many people would like to see B-). Here's a brief description of
things I'm working on and the implications they have. Since many people do
not realize how little things can have big implications.

- Your own additions ?
- Regular Releases
- Write Link
- Highlighted Errors
- Optimizing the Source
- FPU Equates


Your own additions ?

As you may have noticed: development of AsmPro stopped in Q1 2001.

Solo has given me premission to use stuff from AsmPro in ASM-One. And
I do have my eye on some things. But I noticed that it will take quite some
hard work to get it copied. This is mainly due to the fact that AsmPro is not
labeled as nice as ASM-One is. Even though I can almost dream the source of
ASM-One, the source of AsmPro is quite a bit more difficult to wade through.

But if you had additions for AsmPro, and you think they are usefull for ASM-One,
than I'll try to implement them if you send them.

That's the least I could do B-)

Regular Releases

As you know I had promised to release versions on a regular basis. However,
this didn't work as planned in 2001 or 2002. The main reason is that there
is little to do. Most fixes are fixes of small things. All the major
improvements have been added in 2000.

And with little competition, there is little drive for me to work on
ASM-One (which IS the only things left I still do on my Amiga !!!)

So, regular releases are off, iregular releases are ON again...

Write Link

You can read the text below to get around the WL bug in V1.47 and
older versions of ASM-One. As of V1.48 this bug has been fixed.

How to avoid problems with WL:

Before ASM-One writes an executable/object (WO) or a link file (WL), it
browses through it's sections and removes empty/unused sections. The full
sections are renumbered. But ASM-One forget's to do the same with the XDEF
tree. So, when ASM-One starts writing the link file the section numbers
used in the XDEF tree are differend from the renumbered section numbers of
the rest of the code.

The best thing would be if I fixed this problem. But I currently have no
idea how the XDEF tree is structured. And I currently don't dare to touch
the part responsible for writing the executables.

To work around this problem, I'll give you an explenation how ASM-One
works with sections:

When you start ASM-One, you define memory requirements. ASM-One assigns
SECTION 01 to this part. So if you would NOT define any sections, you would
use SECTION 01. The first section defined by the user will be SECTION 02.

For a link file it's required that ALL sections are filed with code or data.
This means that it's best to put all the coding in SECTION 01. Or you could
put a jump in SECTION 01 (like: JMP Start).

The sections after this first section also need something in them. Just a
label will not fool ASM-One. It must be data or a line of coding.

If you follow these rules, you will have no problems writing link files.


Highlighted Errors

Adding Highlighted errors wasn't that complicated (just a few hours work).
But there are so many places in the source where things are done with
operands and opcodes, that it will take time to cover it all.

I'll add more Highlighted Errors in future versions of ASM-One. I did add
it at some places in V1.48, but this is more to help me with tracing
errors than to help you trace errors.


Optimizing the Source

When I thought about this a few years back, I had some realy great ideas
about optimizing. But putting it to practice is alot more work than I
expected.

If I find ways to optimize the code, I'll. But I'll will not go into
great lenghts to make this work.


FPU Equates

As of V1.48, FPU EQUates finally work. The final solution is a combination
of things I had thought about.

Generally, extra memory will be allocated to store FPU value's when needed.
This means that if you don't use FPU EQUates, no extra memory will be
allocated. All allocated memory will be freed up when you exit ASM-One.

Memory is allocated in blocks of 20 Kb, under normal circumtances 20 Kb will
be more than enough. However, this block will be enlarged with an additional
20 Kb when needed. This will continue untill there simply is no memory left.

FPU EQUates will work with the same operators you where able to use when
only the numbers worked.

You WILL NEED a FPU to work with FPU EQUates !!!!


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