v0.5.0

This version extends the assembler to accept uppercase identifiers for instruction mnemonics, labels, and constants. The change allowed reformatting the Assembly demos to take advantage of such a style and uppercase the constants.

The ds and org directives may now have identifiers as operands, possibly in uppercase, which must be defined before use.

Finally, the documentation is available as a separate website.

v0.4.0

Welcome to version 0.4.0 of Suite8080.

New features

There are two main new features in this release.

The first is the ability of asm80 to save the assembled program’s symbol table in the .sym CP/M file format. The other feature enhances the assembler to accept the double-quote character ” as a string delimiter, which means strings and character constants may be written as ”This is a string” and ”F”.

The output of the assembler's help message (-h option) and verbose mode (-v) is now slightly more descriptive and complete.

Documentation and demos

This release comes with a new document describing the usage of the Suite8080 tools and expands the design document by covering the assembler’s parser. Some minor updates to the README.md file list only the currently available Suite8080 tools and add links to the source tree directories it references.

In addition, I changed the memcpy.asm and upcase.asm Assembly demos to make them run on CP/M. However, they produce no visible output and, to inspect how they change the machine state, you need to run the programs inside a debugger such as SID or DDT.

Bug fixes and other changes

The work on this release involved also some refactoring of asm80 to remove redundant declarations of global variables, move the code that saves the assembled program out of main() into its own function, and tweak the code that processes the default output file name.

Finally, I fixed a bug that made the assembler ignore the -o option when building the output file name and - was supplied as the input file.

v0.3.0

The assembler has these new command line options:

• -: read input from standard input
• -o: output file name
• -v: verbose output

Reading from standard input makes it possible to use the Unix program m4 as an Assembly macro processor, as demonstrated by the new sample files ldabcmac.m4 and ldabc.m4 in the asm directory.

v0.2.0

The assembler has the following new features:

• db accepts multiple arguments
• character constants such as 'C' or '*' can be immediate operands of Assembly instructions, as well as arguments of the db and equ directives
• db accepts also labels as arguments

In addition, to prevent confusion with zero, octal numbers now end in Q or q instead of O or o.

v0.1.0

This alpha-quality early relase is incomplete and includes only the assembler and disassembler. But it can be installed from PyPI, which makes it easy to download and try Suite8080.