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| Author | Does asm68k have anything to do with 68k assembly language, like for Mac SW? (Read 79096 times) | ||||||||||||||
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cballero
1024 MB  Posts: 1178 System 7, today and forever 
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on: September 25, 2025, 23:20
As I was searching for things for the 68k MacMESS project, I came across an interesting forum thread about a (modern url) asm68k clone called ClownAssembler. I have no idea what it really does based on what I read, but it looks like it's to be used to optimize Sonic, a 68k console game? I thought it was interesting enough to post here for any thoughts on it! What do you think? 
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Cashed
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128 MB Posts: 192 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #1 on: September 26, 2025, 02:22
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Interesting find @cballero Yes “asm” is the abbreviation of assembly language - it’s a 68000 assembler. The ClownAssembler mimics the behaviour of SNASM68K
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #2 on: September 26, 2025, 15:47
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There are a LOT of assemblers out there...as in multiple ones for the same cpus. So this is one for m68k, but there are tons of others. It always puzzled me why there are so many. They mostly differ from the particular syntax they support, so in some cases, its just easier to find the one that understands the assembly source you happen to have, but one important difference can be in the output format. They can output to ASCII text file "S-records", or to .o files (of MANY different formats), on the Mac directly to CODE resources, or to raw binary, you name it. Some of them offer more "features" than others, but, practically speaking, there's not much assemblers do other than assemble. They're simple creatures and don't actually do much. When I was trying to build the assembly parts of mpeg-dec I was running into the case where I couldn't figure out which assembler they used, due to the syntax. Usually the syntax differences are extremely irritating, but simple enough a perl script (for example) could be written to translate from one to another. It can be goofy things like what character comments are prefixed with, how blocks of bytes are specified, or how registers are named. I could have wrote such a translator if it had ended up useful to get the mpeg-dec assembly to work, but, once I found we didn't have the Mac gui source code, I ended up just using the slower C equivs for the included assembly.
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cballero
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1024 MB Posts: 1178 System 7, today and forever
Reply #3 on: September 26, 2025, 17:40
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Oh got it, I think!  you write these things to get a particular job done, making things work as efficiently as possible: talk about more than nine ways to skin a cat! I suppose each is fine-tuned to its task, so you build it and it just work, for its specific purpose and that's about it, it'd seem! Wow, each day I learn a little more about the wonderfully multifaceted world of software programming, not even touching upon hardware programming; thanks for your wealth of insights, lauland! 
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