During the port, the core of the simulator remained almost the same
( and with small effort, it would be possible to extend it to other
68xx-family microprocessors ) while the interface became a strange
mixture of ANSI and Mac Toolbox code ( sscanf mixed with FSRead and similar).
The back-bone of Mac-specific code is MacStarter,
an application framework by David Eck (eck@hws.bitnet), extended to support
a primitive multi-window text-editor & file handling.
This program is absolutely FREEWARE and comes with source code (for the brave ones),
but if you improve it in any way, I would like to be informed;
if redistributing the application, I ask that whole documentation and sources be included,
and, in case it were a modified version, you should clearly state so.
Since first release, many bugs have been fixed and the interface has evolved a bit,
thanks also to those who contributed code and ideas (in particular Rob Scott, Rus Maxham and Mark Coniglio).
Keep on with your precious feedback!
For any kind of suggestion, bug report or comment, you can reach me by Email
at sarago@dei.unipd.it .
In particular, bug reports would be more "pleasant" if accompanied
by some 6811 assembly code illustrating the problem :)
And last but not least, if you like this program,
what about a postcard from your country ?
My address is:
Thanks to all those who wrote.
Bye, Tomaso
If it can be of some use, the simulator runs also in background and the "kindness" towards background processes (and user interaction) can be tuned throught the Options dialog.
Balloon help is available on menus (no dialogs at this time).
It is possible to disable it to speed up things on slower Macs, in particular while stepping through the code with many open windows.
Note that symbol evaluation is CaSe SEnSiTive and unrecognized symbols (or invalid hex values) will be signaled during dialog input.
A simple way to create files of symbols:
using As11, the freeware Motorola assembler, turn on option -s, redirect output to a text file and assemble your ASM file. using As11+, just drop ASM file (As11+ is configured to generate symbol files).
Symbol files should have the same name as their S19 counterparts in order to be loaded
automatically.
In fact, while loading S19 files, the simulator does the following:
In case you edit SYM files by hand, please note that hex values are not allowed as labels (otherwise, how could the simulator distinguish between, say, hex FFA1 and symbol FFA1 ?).
Symbols still lack some functionality : for example, it is not rare to see incorrect labels (in case of duplicate values, the first label is choosen) so I left it as an option.
While interrupts are enabled, every loaded program should set its interrupt vectors.
Non-initialized interrupt vectors may cause "bad op" errors
during program execution.
A good practice is to make all unused interrupt vectors point to a
"spurious" interrupt handler (see hexmon40.asm for an example).
Most of these tools can be downloaded, via anonymous FTP, from
cher.media.mit.edu or ftp.ee.ualberta.ca.
By the way, if you find other interesting tools, why not dropping me a line at sarago@dei.unipd.it ? Thanks.