Any interest in LucasFilm's Macross 6502 Assembler? It's at Github

[Lynxpro]

LucasFilm's Macross 6502 Assembler has been released to Github.

 

https://github.com/Museum-of-Art-and-Digital-Entertainment/macross

[Justin Payne]

Cool. I'll have to check it out. What is the background on this?

[Lynxpro]

Cool. I'll have to check it out. What is the background on this?

 

It's LucasFilm's in-house Assembler they used to create several of their 8-bit titles with. Perhaps it may be of use to port certain titles over to A8 that they failed to release for the platform.

[dmsc]

Hi!,

 

Cool. I'll have to check it out. What is the background on this?

It was created by Chip Morningstar, see the history from http://www.pagetable.com/?p=848 :

 

Its thrilling for me for this stuff to finally see the light of day. One minor correction: Macross was not written as part of the Habitat project. It was a general tool that predates the start of Habitat by a year or two. It was used on every 6502 (Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, and Apple II) game that we produced at Lucasfilm Games, from 1984 up until those machines ceased to be relevant to the games market.

 

Macross was my first job assignment at Lucasfilm. They urgently wanted to replace the existing assembler they had been using. That one was written in Lisp you wrote 6502 code in S-expressions, which looked amazingly weird. It was awesomely powerful, because you could use all of Lisp for a macro language, but it was also awesomely slow. It took about 45 minutes on our VAX 750 to assemble a 16K ROM cartridge game, mainly because doing this took 2 megabytes of RAM but the machine only had 512 kilobytes, so it page swapped horribly. My mission was to create a more conventional looking (and performing) assembler without sacrificing much of the macro programming power they had gotten addicted to, hence Macross.

[R4ngerM4n]

Wow, they used a self-written Crossassembler. I didn't know!