CodeX

Introduction

When David Murray ("The 8-Bit Guy") envisioned the X16 he was thinking of including a "Super Monitor". This would allow a programmer to interactively enter assembly instructions and debug the program within a single environment. The result of this is X16 CodeX Interactive Assembly Environment (CodeX for short). The intention is to enable a programming experience that is as interactive as BASIC.

About me

I'm a veteran software engineer and enjoy messing around with old and modern computers. When I'm not writing code, I'm either sailing or working on home maintenance.

You can contact me regarding this work at: x16.asm.env@gmail.com. - Mike Allison

Design Goals (and anti-Goals)

CodeX is intended to:

• Allow interactive entry of instructions

• Support for labels and symbols

  • Pre-load symbols for the X16 kernel calls

• Traditional monitor capabilities

  • Examine memory and code listings

  • Watch specific values

  • Run, break, step, and stop execution of your program

  • Load and save (binary and text)

CodeX is not intended to:

• Be a full scale assembler

  • Very complex assembly time expressions not supported

• No relocatable objects (e.g. no linker capabilities)

• Full assembler functionality (e.g. macros)

Roadmap

This rough map will provide you with some idea of the implementation versions:

• 0.4 - UI test, early feedback from testers

• 0.5 - Step & Break functionality, support display modes, refactored instruction decoder, support emulator R34

• 0.61 - Interactive entry of instructions, save functionality

• 0.7 - Save, code relocation, data statement entry, show breaks, support other drives.

• 0.8 - Feature complete, fix bugs, save user program as text.

• 0.9 - Optimize for space, make ROMable, fix usability issues.

• 1.0 - In ROM ship with units.

Possible future extensions, but not planned for 1.0 (not committed by development team):

• Standalone assembler module

  • Callable from BASIC, in some form.

  • ISO character mode.

  • Native basic assembler, run from disk to have native development possible.

FAQ

• You should make this open source!

  • Yes, it will be, once we've realized David's vision

• I've got some code for you to include...

  • Great! Let's talk, once it's been open sourced.

• I don't understand what this opcode does

  • Good news: There are lots of excellent 65c02 tutorials on the interwebs

• How come it doesn't work with the 65816?

  • Future option, we're keeping our options open.

• I'm ready to start messing about

  • Click the link to select a versions (above) and read more there.