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ZSS: <no nice picture availabe> :-(

The second important thing (besides my 'Heimat' mentioned elsewhere) I must talk about is my free HP64000 like assembler. An executable is available for DOS but porting to other platforms should be fairly easy. Have a look at the (TURBO PASCAL) sources!

Today nearly everybody knows about the latest processors, the many megahertz it has and the many MIPS it makes and the like. Not so me. That means: I know about these things but I also spent quite some time in squeezing bits and bytes into ROM chips controlling which task the good old Intel 8085 (just running at 5 MHz bus cycle!) or Zilog Z180 should perform.

Starting with a programming system from Intel (do you remember these big blue boxes with their 8'' floppies capable of storing 180 kbytes at least?) we switched to HP with their HP64000 system. Later we stepped to a Motorola 68k based HP workstation running HP-UX. In the meantime also this machine should be thrown on the scrap-heap. But since our many assembler sources are heavily using HP's macro syntax we depend on this machine. As far as I know, HP does not support it's (old) HP64000 assembler on newer platforms any longer, do they?

Quite independently from this development I decided to try writing my own assembler. It was a pure 'academic' decision. Neither did my employer ask me to do it nor did he pay me for it. All activities took place in my spare time. The idea was born long ago (about 1989 or so I think). However this does not mean that I'm working on it since then! Sometimes I got a good new idea and then I implemented it. On the other hand there were long times when nothing happened.

So after having seen that it basically works with our (assembler) sources, I decided to make my assembler public. As written in the 'readme' there are several deviations and omissions from HP. The most important might be that my version is just an absolute assembler. I do not handle relocatable code. But for our ROMs this was/is not necessary.


After having read all that stuff I guess you are quite curious coming to the point. But before downloading the software you may also have a glance at the readme .

zss306.exe (selfextracting LHA-archive for DOS)

(134632 bytes)

zss306.tgz (compressed tar-archive)

(124271 bytes)

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Rudolf Schubert, rudolf@muc.de , Wed Mar 20 08:35:31 CET 2024