A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

Hi. I tend to run into awkward situations with Asmpro from time to time and I thought I'd start a thread which lists annoyances and how they can be worked around... My first post will be this

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseacti on=user.editAlbumPhoto&albumID=91815&imageID=16444 873

This is the second time I've made a source behave like this when compiling. In PhxAss it compiles fine. Anyone know what is happening? Is there a version which this doesn't happen? (I've tried increasing the workmem btw, without any luck).

v1.16d here, but i get something along the same lines in v1.17 too

I think one needs to be logged in into myspace to view the picture?

oh :P.. will fix later today.

It has become a natural reflex for my fingers to press Esc twice every time I paste a block past the bottom of the editor. Maybe it is time to switch to 1.17 - the bug seems to be fixed in that version. :)

Looking at the version history... Gosh, has it really been 7 years since I did those fixes? Now I'm feeling really old... ;)

I also have a quite annoying problem. When I have written some nasty stuff and the 1.16 passes trough and tries to correct it ... the whole thing crashes completely :(

Basically this appears writing short branches ( f.e. "beq.s") in the first place not knowing that the branch distance is too far away. So the Asm forces to word size ... and crashes itself into another carnation o_O
Same stuff happens when I set it to, say, 68000 strict and somewhere an 020 instruction is still in the code (or an include) ... the error message "68020 instruction found (or so)" is printed and than good bye.

Do you also have that problem? If not it might be a preference problem or my system a acts a little awkward in that case.

Another problem.. If you scroll holding shift down and scroll to the top, the editor crashes. I suspect you somehow scroll past the top and everything screws up :) So much code has been lost in that crap.

Oh yes, that sucked. And if you consider that this bug has been present for so many years it sucks even more.

bah.. can't get a proper link.. so sod it. I have to pay 42 NOK to get some real space.

@loaderror: off-topic but have you ever considered webspace on untergrund? You could host your eph site on there too... which i just noticed doesn't exist anymore.

www.ephidrena.org still exists, but it is rarely updated these days. It may be back sooner or later though if someone can get motivated to add new releases.

It has always been ephidrena.org though i could swear seeing ephidrena.net somewhere recently. Btw, you should keep adding prods to the site. The info on each prod is hilarious.

But anyway, back on topic.

I got a tip from Blueberry regarding my infinitely looping problem. If I explicitly put all code in a section then it may disappear.. I did this and the problem disappeared, but when I removed the section again, the problem didn't reappear.. hohumm. Anyways that might be the magic remedy workaround.

Another problem.. If you scroll holding shift down and scroll to the top, the editor crashes. I suspect you somehow scroll past the top and everything screws up :) So much code has been lost in that crap.


How does it crash? It reboots the Amiga? Or it just freezes? The latter problem I faced often too, specially happens when you have some "weird" characters (like a nifty Ascii f.e.) in your source, AsmPro seems to get lost trying to find the end of line (or smth). One time it happened where I didn't feel like losing all my source (as I didn't save for several hours) I just started an external debugger and saw that AsmPro was "having fun" in some endless loop. So I simply skipped the loop and I could continue to work in AsmPro as if nothing had happened. :)

What you want to do is identify the loop and find it in the source code, then figure out why it goes wrong and fix it :)

I've always used AsmOne myself, even though I find it a very buggy program I've never suffered from the things said in this thread. What is the reason for using AsmPro over AsmOne if you don't mind me asking.

At the time I started using AsmPro it seemed to be the least buggy of the two, and I could make it run on a CGX screen. But maybe I should give AsmOne another chance soon. After all, the bugs in both assemblers seem to change over time, and from one Amiga to the next.

I don't get the crashes Dodge gets when byte branches are changed to word branches, for example. The assembly just fails because the code is changed, but since the changes are made to the source code (which of course is pretty ridiculous in itself), all i have to do is recompile it and it works. When I carelessly scroll towards the top of the source the editor sometimes locks up, but pressing ESC still takes me back to the command line, unlike what Stingray experiences. But on the other hand, I alone can completely crash my Asm-Pro by pressing RAMIGA+W+E. Also in the past I could crash it by typing "k" on the command line, but this has either fixed itself or it disappeared with an update, can't remember.

Thing is you sort of get used to it after a while and there aren't really any good alternatives anyway. There was a time I felt like giving it a thorough fix-up, but then I saw the source file (yes, singular, file), some 900kB of pure chaos, and I decided it wasn't worth it.

So I guess what I'm saying is, meh.

The sourcecode of asmpro is actually a disassembled version of asm-one with improvements.

Thus 900k unreadable mess :D

I use it because of syntax-highlighting. There is an unreleased command line version of the assembler
available...

A disassembled version of AsmOne you mean. ;)

I started to use it mainly because it had graphics card support (syntax highlighting is for weenies! ;D). When it comes to the actual assembler, AsmOne is still the better choice as AsmPro (at least the version I am using) still has a lot of problems with perfectly valid opcodes (specially bitfields).

I see, well AsmOne supports retarget-able screens since a couple of years back so that shouldn't stop anyone any longer. Just out of curiosity, syntax-highlighting in Assembler?

The main problem I have with AsmOne is that I keep getting things to work when running from the assembler but when I make an executable they stop working. We spent a good 5h to get Buddleigh Salterton to work after we finished it "in" AsmOne.

The nature boys switched to PhxAss long back and keep trying to convince me as well. But there is something about switching programs after 10-12 years =)

AsmPro still has the better RTG support IMHO, you can choose your fonts freely etc. which AsmOne doesn't allow (afair). And using an 8 pixel font on an 800x600 screen isn't too nice. :)

As for PhxAss, it's not perfect either. It accepts some stupid opcodes like moveq.w (yes Loady, I still remember that :P) and the optimizer often breaks things. It's not a bad assembler though.

About your problems with the executables not working, can you elaborate a bit on that? What does actually happen? You save the executable with wo and it just crashes?

RE: Syntax highlighting in assembler

Yeah, especially useful to see easily which parts are commented out.

BTW: I never experienced the Text-Scrolling-Over-The-Top-Bug. I can press that Shift-Up/Down (or Ctrl-Up/Down) as long as I want (even hold'em down). No freeze.

Highlighting -> I second Xeron. Only reason why I got it enabled

Highlighting in ASM == useless (and thus for weenies ;D) ;) That's just my highly unbiased ;D opinion.

@StingRay, but if you need to increase the font size aren't you just running in a too high resolution =)

What happens is that everything works in the assembler but when making an executable with wo it doesn't. I think it's usually down to memory leaks in my code (I'm very sloppy with these things).

@bonkers: strange, I only had problems the other way around. Didn't work on Asm - Debug but after writing the object it worked on the system.

I've got another thing with the Asm-One/Pro that's buggin' me from time to time. Not exactly a bug resulting in a reboot but in "!!" and restarting the Asm.
That is the refreshing of just-edited (say on source-tab #2 f.e.) external includes. When I finished the editing of the include i.e. "U" and jump back to the main source for a debug - run "D" "r" , it's like the old include is cached.
Or am I missing a neat "REFRESH EXTERNALS" command here ?

dodge: "zi" (z.ap i.ncludes) is your friend. ;)

\o/ zanx

you're welcome :)

bonkers: that might very well be true but you know how it is, old ppl need laaaarge fonts to see anything :D

here is that screenshot I