style64.org

Greetings. We maintain and develop Turbo Macro Pro. Aside from whats been recommended here, the other great advantage of TMP is the use of a ram expansion unit (REU). While these are harder to come by as real hardware, VICE will emulate the REU. You'll find that the "TMP+REU" modification uses the REU to enable two key features: (1) you can keep up to 6 different source code projects in memory at once, useful as a sort of ad hoc "version control" while you code, or for working on a library/kernel source at the same time as you're working on a main code section, etc. (2) the REU acts as a temporary storage for your source code while you test: your code is assembled to REU, then swapped out leaving you with almost the full memory for your code/data. Without an REU you're generally limited to coding for memory only up to maybe $6000-$7000 give or take depending on your code size. This will not be a big problem as you learn but if you want to code on the real thing extensively it can be problematic. With an REU, TMP gives you the absolute fastest possible code-test-code cycle available (on the real hardware) for almost any project. We've been meaning to create some sort of quick start documentation and if you are intent on learning to code with TMP/VICE we'd be happy to assist you and then fold over the shared experience into said documentation for future parties. We'd really value hearing the kinds of questions and problems that someone completely new to c64 coding might have. PM me some email contact details if interested. Also, we'd further recommend TMPx which is our cross assembler developed specifically to provide a truely compatible syntax with TMP. You could code using TMP, then eventually convert your source codes to ASCII (using a conversion program, 'TMPview') to continue coding using TMPx on, say, win32, OSX, or linux - or even move from TMPx/cross assembling back to TMP on the real thing, with some careful considerations. You can find current documentation for both the c64 and cross assembler tools here: http://turbo.style64...ble-of-contents Thanks, and good luck!