The Assembly Language Development System (ALDS)
[Copyright 2007 Frank Durda IV, All Rights Reserved.
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What is ALDS?
ALDS was the original name for a Z-80 assembler that was written in
the "C" language. Originally developed on a DEC VAX 11/780 under the
VMS operating system, and development continued when the 11/780 system
was converted to BSD UNIX.
The ALDS assembler was later extended to also support the Hitachi HD64180,
a processor that supported a superset of Z80 instructions. (The HD64180
was also sold under license as the Zilog Z-180.)
ALDS was also ported again to work under Tandy 6000 XENIX and as part
of this restoration, ported to compile with the GCC compiler found on
FreeBSD and other modern systems that are dervied from or based on
elements of BSD UNIX.
Tandy also produced a native Z-80 assembler that was compatible with the
original ALDS assembler functions. These were meant for use on the
TRS-80 Model II, Model III and Model 4 computers.
These native assembler versions were known as ALASM and ALLINK.
What is ALDS good for today?
Although a number of other Z-80 cross-assemblers exist, this one will
assemble much of the Z-80 assembly-language source code for software
produced by Tandy for the TRS-80 Z-80 computer systems without changes,
as this was the assembler used when those programs were originally
developed. Since implementations of macros and other assembler directives
are usually not compatible between assemblers, having the one that software
was developed on will usually yield the best results.
A history of the ALDS assembler and ALDS system. (HTML)
"C" Version of ALDS
This is "C" version assembler known as "alds" and linker (originally
known as "link", now called "linkz80"), which were originally developed
on VMS and continued on BSD UNIX 4.1. Over the years it has been extended
to support the additional CPU instructions found in the Hitachi HD64180
(later sold under license as the Zilog Z-180). It has also been ported
to the Tandy XENIX 6000 environment, and ported to compile with a GCC
compiler and run on number of operating systems, including
BSD-derived FreeBSD.
The "C" cross-development version of the ALDS assembler and linker. (HTML)
Native Model 4 Version of ALDS
This is a version of the ALDS system as developed to run natively
on the TRS-80 Model 4 system under the TRSDOS 6 and LS-DOS 6 operating
systems.
(Note that the TRSDOS 6 and LS-DOS 6 operating systems
themselves were developed by Logical Systems and that company used
a Z-80 assembly-language assembler of their own design.)
This version of ALDS includes bug fixes, improvements and other changes that
make it notably different from the version released by Tandy, but it
is backward-compatible with the Tandy version.
Coming Soon - not yet available
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[Copyright 2007 Frank Durda IV, All Rights Reserved.
Mirroring of this web page in any form is expressly prohibited.
The official web site for this material is: http://nemesis.lonestar.org
Contact this address for use clearances: clearance at nemesis.lonestar.org
Comments and queries to this address: web_software_2011 at nemesis.lonestar.org]