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DEV: Ballblazer Techniques


tschak909

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All the parenthesis makes me think it's Lisp. The opcodes are function calls, similar to how shasm65 worked (that funny assembler I wrote in bash). People have done assemblers this way in various languages. Here's an x86 assembler in Python: http://codeflow.org/entries/2009/jul/31/pyasm-python-x86-assembler/
They call it runtime assembly.

Edited by ivop
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Lisp was chosen for the cross assembler because it only took two weeks to implement a cross assem- bler that allowed both assembler macro definitions and arbitrary Lisp expressions to be included in the assembly task. This allowed us to extend or reconfigure the assembler as we discovered unforeseen needs and deficiencies.

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Nice read! A lot of their reasoning was similar to mine when I wrote shasm65 in 2009 (how time flies...):

 

Because both the assembler and the source files it assembles are just shell scripts, you have all of the shell functionality (including calling external applications) as your "macro" language. You can create your own functions, use for loops, tests, if/then/else/fi conditional assembly, arithmetic, all you can think of.

 

Similarly, their source files are just Lisp programs that, when run, generate a binary.

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Yes, I believe, at least the early Atari, ran VAX machines. So did Lucasfilm in the early days. That's where their Lisp cross-assembler ran on.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/248968-lucasfilm-atari-programming-using-lisp-and-unix/

 

Here's the source code to Macross:

 

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

 

Lucasfilm moved on to Motorola 68K machines, running SunOS, which was a BSD-like Unix, until Solaris (SunOS 5) which was more Sys V-ish.

Edited by ivop
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