Going Back to EDASM, the 1980 Apple II Editor/Assembler

Summary

A very long (3600 words) ramble through my experience of getting an EDASM development environment set up on an Apple IIc. Takeaway: the problems are no worse (perhaps easier) than modern development tools, and you need off-board printing (to a printer or a larger screen) of your assembly listings.

Introduction

Many (almost 40!) years ago, someone brought to my junior high school Apple II+ computer lab a diskette labeled “HRCG.” Nobody was quite sure what it was, though we eventually figured out that stood for “High Resolution Character Generator,” but the diskette had some good looking (for that computer and time) games and demos on it.

ribbit

This disk was was actually the DOS Tool Kit 1.0. Follow that link and you can “play” the disk image in the emulator; once a command prompt appears, RUN RIBBIT will produce the screen you see above. RUN MAXWELL will also produce a fun little demo, though that one looks a bit different from what it did on a real CRT monitor. Sadly, the emulation seems to have a problem with what I’ll be demonstrating in this post, but it ought to work in a standalone Apple II+ emulator if you want to follow along.

The disk was copied and traded around for a bit, as was the wont of impecunious junior high school students, but was soon enough forgotten as new and better games came around.

But I was curious as to what the other stuff on this diskette was, and soon enough I found out that one of the things on it was called EDASM, and was used for some mysterious thing called “assembly language” programming. (The instructor in our lab never got beyond Applesoft BASIC, so I had to figure all this stuff out myself.)

I don’t know if I ever got hold of a copy of the Apple 6502 Assembler/Editor manual, but I must have found some sort of book somewhere because I did start playing with it a bit, and eventually even learned to poke at the system monitor and read some of the mysterious ROM listing in the Apple II Reference Manual.

Recently I wanted to run a little test program on my Apple IIc that required assembly language. I have yet to work out a really convenient and quick way to transfer builds from my Unix cross-assembly system to my IIc, and rather than do that now I thought this would be a good opportunity to go back to EDASM and remind myself what it was really like.

Finding and Loading the Software

Finding the software itself wasn’t too bad; as mentioned above there are several “DOS Tool Kit” images on archive.org, though I’m not sure if any of them are the original distribution diskette. Most of them seem to have extra files of some sort; I just picked one more or less at random.

The next step was to get a copy on to my Apple IIc, which was no problem using ADTPro, or wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t mysteriously stopped working since the last time I used it. Lowering the serial speed from 115,200 (yes, Apples really do transfer just fine at that rate!) to 19,200 and perusing the server-side log files (for both ADTPro and the kernel logs for my USB serial adapter) didn’t help, so it was time to pull out heavy weaponry: the oscilloscope.

I pulled the cover off the DIN-5 connector at the Apple end of the cable, put a probe on its TX line, and that all seemed to look good, though it was around this time I started to think that perhaps the decoding on my Rigol DS1054Z isn’t so great. But the RX line was looking very dodgy; even quiescent it was basically noise a couple of volts in amplitude rather than a nice 12 V RS-232 signal. Obviously the problem was somewhere further down towards the PC, perhaps with my cheap PL2303 USB serial cable (yes, next time I buy FTDI). The easiest spot to get access next was at the DE-9 end of the Apple serial cable, so I took the shell off that and immediately it started working. Clearly taking apart just one end and threatening it with an oscilloscope was not enough to scare that cable into submission. (I must admit, it was also a little worrying that the Apple RX line was connected to the pin with only two strands of the wire, so I resoldered that before putting it back together.)

Once the cable was working ADTPro wrote the image to a 5.25" floppy like a, well, pro. After running a couple of the HRCG demo programs for nostalgia’s sake I booted the DOS 3.3 System Master and ran COPYA to make a second copy of the diskette for use as a work disk. This turned out to be perhaps an overly “nostalgic” experience as I confirmed that a full-disk copy on an Apple II needs about ten disk swaps. (Now that I think about it, it would have been much faster just to have ADTPro write a second copy.) No wonder we didn’t back up so often back in the day!

Given a work disk with only three sectors free and full of stuff I didn’t need, the next step was to remove about 45 files I didn’t need. These files were marked read-only (“locked,” in DOS 3.3 terminology) so I needed to type, e.g., UNLOCK MAXWELL followed by DELETE MAXWELL to remove each file. (DOS 3.3 does not support wildcards.) As I found myself wishing for Bourne shell, I suddenly realized that I did have something similar!

10 D$ = CHR$(4) : REM CTRL-D
20 EXT$ = ".SET"
100  READ F$
120 FF$ = F$ + EXT$
130  PRINT FF$
140  PRINT D$;"UNLOCK ";FF$
150  PRINT D$;"DELETE ";FF$
160  GOTO 100
200  DATA MAX,FROGS1,FROGS2,SKY1,SKY2,SKY3,M
    USH,ASCII,BLIPPO BLACK,BYTE,COLOSSAL,COU
    NT,CYRILLIC,ESPERANTO,FLOW,GOTHIC,GRAPHI
    C,GREEK,KATAKANA,MIRROR,OUTLINE,PINOCCHI
    O,PUDGY,ROMAN,SHADOW,SLANT,STOP,UPSIDE D
    OWN

On the Apple, all output to the screen goes through a DOS routine that scans it for lines starting with Ctrl-D and executes those lines as DOS commands, just as if they were typed at the keyboard. (This is an artifact of how the original ROMs did I/O, and related to why you set your print output routine to ROM in the disk controller card with PR#6 to boot a diskette.) So running the above program, followed by a few more tweaks and different names in the DATA statement, cleaned up my disk with little effort, allowing me to relax and appreciate how slow DOS file operations on floppies are.

Having reduced my floppy contents to the ten or so files I really needed (EDASM, INTEDASM, EDASM.OBJ, ASSM, EDITOR, ASMIDSTAMP, RLOAD, and RBOOT) I made a backup copy of the disk (via an ADTPro upload: nostalgia goes only so far!) and was ready to type RUN EDASM and start work:

edasm
edasm.obj

Manual

Of course, I first had to figure out how to use the system, which meant getting some documentation. Archive.org had the manual for the newer ProDOS version, ProDOS Assembler Tools Manual from 1983, but of course this is retrocomputing and I don’t want to be jumping off and switching to modern tools and documentation at the slightest inconvenience.

A post on applefritter pointed me at the Applesoft Tool Kit manual (or at least part of it), but while that was on the DOS Tool Kit disk image I’d downloaded, it Was Not The Documentation I Was Looking For. But (re-)learning about apple.asimov.net was the key, and looking under the 6502assembly/ documentation directory instead of the basic/ directory let me find the Apple 6502 Assembler/Editor manual, which I then uploaded to archive.org for searchability (archive.org OCRs uploaded documentation) easier reference (they also provide an on-line reader) and faster downloading.

First Steps

The first thing to do, of course, is start taking notes. Here I regret to say that, to my eternal shame, I did not do this with a pen and paper but instead used a markdown file committed to my Git repo for notes. (And I’m not writing this post in AppleWriter, either!) The only excuse I can provide is that I live in a tiny Japanese apartment and have no room for massive stacks of paper documentation. (Don’t ask how I have room for all these old computers.) I did, however, make some concession to contemporary practice by hauling out my paper copy of the Apple II Reference Manual. Oddly enough, in some ways that turns out to be more convenient than turning to another monitor to page through a PDF scan.

The next step is to learn enough of the editor commands that I can type in and edit a simple program. Typing in a ? prints a couple of screenfulls of help text (with a pause in the middle, continuing when you press a key) that gives the general idea (what appears in lower case below is actually in inverse text on the Apple II, because though my IIc supports lower-case, the original Apple II did not):

:?

ASM SOURCE FILE,<OBJECT FILE>,s<#>,d<#>
APPEND <LINE#>  SOURCE FILE
Add <LINE#>
CATalog
COpy LINE# - <LINE#> TO LINE#
Change <BEGIN# <-END#>> .OLDSTR.NEWSTR.
DRive #
Delete <BEGIN# <-END#>>
END
Edit <BEGIN# <-END#>>  .STRING.
FILE
Find <BEGIN# <-END#>>  .STRING.
HImem= #
Insert LINE#
LENgth
LOmem= #
LOaD SOURCE FILE
List <BEGIN# <-END#>>
MON
NEW
PR# # ,<DEVCTL>
Print <BEGIN# <-END#>>
Replace <BEGIN# <-END#>>
SLot #
SaVE  <BEGIN# <-END#>>  <SOURCE FILE>
TRuncOFf
TRuncON
TLOAD <BEGIN# <-END#>>
TSAVE <BEGIN# <-END#>>
Tabs <BEGIN# <-END#>>  .STRING.
Where LINE#

I won’t go into the details of each command here; you can have a look at my quick reference (which is likely still incomplete) or the full description of the editor in the manual, which I read through bit by bit as I went along.

The editor is actually somewhat similar to Unix ed, with List (with line numbers), Print (without line numbers), Insert, Append, and Change (like ed’s s) commands. One welcome addition, though, is a complex Edit command (taking up four pages of the manual) that allows a sort of visual editing for a single line. (It even has a vi-like “find char” command; type Ctrl-F followed by the character you wish to find and it will move the cursor forward in the line to that character.)

A major difference from ed is that there are many more commands (particularly for handling various disk operations that ed doesn’t do) and thus the commands are longer. However, they may be abbreviated by typing only the non-inverted (lower-case, above) characters.

One of the first ones I had to try was that tempting MON command, which does indeed drop you into the ROM’s machine-language monitor. The manual says on page 23 that “Normally this command is not used, except when you want to [do] some unusual things,” and gives dire warnings about how you can mess up your session by using it, which seems a bit odd for a package aimed at assembly language programmers. I would have ignored this had I seen it, but of course I didn’t even look up the command before trying it, leaving me wondering how to get back to the editor. We have powerful tools available, however, and indeed rebooting the machine did the trick. I later learned that Ctrl-Y Enter will go back to the editor, as will the standard 3D0G DOS vector that I had entirely forgotten about.

Writing a Program

A quick poke into the manual confirmed that one or more space characters are considered a “tab” between the label, mnemonic, operand and comment fields, and so I entered my first short program by typing A, which presented me with line numbers at which I typed my code. I couldn’t figure out how to end input mode, so after trying just a ., I tried Ctrl-D alone on a line and got lucky! (You can also use Ctrl-Q.)

(Actually, my whole process to get what you’re seeing here was much more roundabout, but I’ve condensed this to give you the idea without a huge amount of annoying detail.)

Listing it did not produce nicely formatted output, however:

:L

     1 * MY FIRST EDASM
     2 COUT EQU $FDED ;CHAR OUTPUT ROUTINE
     3  LDA #'H
     4  JSR COUT ;A VERY SHORT "HELLO"
     5  RTS

I thought I’d seen something about the editor automatically lining up the “tabbed” fields at specific columns. It turns out that it does, but I’d invoked the TAB command to see what it does. I thought, “nothing,” but without any arguments it had cleared the default tab stops. My big hammer of a restart fixed that, but I’ve since determined that T14,19,29 (which actually sets the tabstops to columns 16, 21 and 31!) will set tabstops back to the startup settings. Listing again:

     1 *        MY    FIRST     EDASM
     2 COUT     EQU   $FDED     ;CHAR OUT
       PUT ROUTINE
     3          LDA   #'H
     4          JSR   COUT      ;A VERY S
       HORT "HELLO"
     5          RTS

Wow, that’s a bit annoying. I now also understand why they have the TRON command to truncate lines at the start of the comment field, so long as the comment starts with space-semicolon:

     1 *        MY    FIRST     EDASM
     2 COUT     EQU   $FDED
     3          LDA   #'H
     4          JSR   COUT
     5          RTS

But you’d think that they’d get the editor to understand lines with a comment starting at the beginning of the line.

Assembly

Anyway, SAVE FIRST PROGRAM followed by ASM FIRST PROGRAM, after much chugging away on the disk drive, assembles without errors and does produce a reasonable listing on the screen, albeit truncated at the right. (I still don’t know how to view that right-hand portion; the manual, on page 27, says just that the “rightmost 40 [columns] will be available for viewing via keyboard commands.”)

    SOURCE FILE: FIRST PROGRAM
    0000:            1 * MY FIRST EDASM
    FDED:            2 COUT    EQU  $FDED
    0000:A9 D8       3         LDA  #'H
    0002:20 ED FD    4         JSR COUT
    0005:60          5         RTS

    *** SUCCESSFUL ASSEMBLY: NO ERRORS

     FDED COUT           FDED COUT

And while I can pause and “single-step” the assembly listing with the space bar during assembly, it’s clear that in retrocomputingland a printer is going to be essential for working any kind of major program. Much as I’d like to have an Epson MX-80 buzzing away, they don’t come so cheap these days, ribbons and tractor feed paper are hard to get in Japan (though, surprisingly, not in the U.S.) and I don’t have the space. But I have a solution: more on this later.

Loading the Assembled Program

In the meantime, I’d like to run my program, but certainly loading it over the zero page is not a good idea. So where?

As it turns out, the manual has an entire appendix on the memory usage of the assembler and editor. (EDASM.OBJ is actually just a control program that loads EDITOR to let you do your editing, and the loads ASSM over top of the editor when you use the ASM command, reloading EDITOR again over that when done.) But there’s not much in the way of free space here. The manual claims that $3D0-$3FF is unused by the editor, but that’s actually the standard location of the Apple DOS vectors, so trashing those seems like a bad idea (especially since they’re used by the assembler).

Rather than worry about things like this, I decided to investigate the LOMEM= and HIMEM= commands provided by EDASM; a HIMEM setting persists through the whole session and, if set appropriately, should keep both the editor and the assembler from stomping on my code (and my code from stomping on their data).

But in the classic Apple tradition, though they give you the memory map in hexadecimal, the program wants and displays decimal numbers, as seen when I confirm my current memory situation:

:FILE

 FIRST PROGRAM,D1,S6
  112 BYTES USED
30096 BYTES REMAINING

Well, 30096 + 112 = 30208 = $7600, that plus the default LOMEM of $2000 is $9600, which is indeed the end of the memory used by the system according to the memory map. (Actually, the last address is $95FF. DOS starts at $9600 on a 48 KB machine.) So I can just bring HIMEM down to $9000 and the area $9000-$9600 should be free for me to use:

:HIMEM=$9000
PARAMETER(S) OMITTED ERROR

Oh, right. Sigh.

:HIMEM=36864

:LEN
  112 BYTES USED
28560 BYTES REMAINING

28560+112+$2000 is indeed $9000, so we’re set. I add an ORG $9000 line to the beginning of my program, assemble, and we’re ready to try it out.

Running the Program

In Apple DOS, the first word of a binary (type B) file specifies the start location and the second word the length, so we need not specify these (with ,A$9000,L6 parameters appended to the BLOAD command). Once it’s loaded, we can enter the monitor, confirm that it looks ok, and run it:

:.BLOAD FIRST PROGRAM.OBJ0

:MON

*9000.900F

9000- A9 C8 20 ED FD 60 8E A5
9008- 22 8D 73 83 60 2C 54 C0

*9000L
9000-   A9 C8       LDA   #$C8
9002-   20 ED FD    JSR   $FDED
9005-   60          RTS
…

*9000G
H
*

It works!

Unfortunately for us if we want to run this standalone, the BRUN command that an end-user would use does a JMP to the program, not a JSR as the monitor’s R command uses. To make BRUN work, I suppose I can change the RTS at the end to a JMP $3D0, which should re-enter DOS and then send us back to whatever interpreter we were using. After making the change, saving and assembling, we test from both the EDASM prompt (:) and Applesoft BASIC (]):

:.BRUN FIRST PROGRAM.OBJ0
H
:
:END

]BRUN FIRST PROGRAM.OBJ0H
]

Well, I guess I should have printed a CR first. :-)

Listings

I mentioned earlier that for larger programs, having a proper assembly listing is a must; it’s simply too hard to read large amounts of code in an editor that can display no more than 18 lines of 34 characters each (the line numbers from the List command take up the first six columns), especially when you need to type in new parameters to the List command for each page because you can’t pause the scrolling output when more than one screenful is displayed.

The system provides a PR#p,[DevCtlstrg] command, similar to BASIC’s PR#n command to redirect output. Unlike BASIC, this EDASM command doesn’t do the redirect immediately, but instead stores it as a parameter for the assembler which does the redirect when it generates the listing.

If I had a parallel port card in slot 1, just PR#1 would probably do. But I have an Apple IIc which has no parallel port; instead it’s got a serial card in “virtual” slot 1. Since I’m going to have to use serial anyway, though, I’m going to use the serial port in slot 2 because that’s the port I use for ADTPro.

The Apple IIc Technical Reference Manual documents what I need to know. According to page 173 the port at startup is set to 300/8/N/1, so on the Unix side I can

stty </dev/ttyUSB0 300 min 1 -parenb; cat /dev/ttyUSB0

(The min 1 setting is required to ensure that cat will not immediately exit if no characters are available to be read. This is the default setting on Linux, but ADTPro will change it to min 0.)

Then from BASIC on the Apple I enter a small program, type PR#2, then LIST. This produces rubbish on the output. But ah! the Apple II sets the high bit on its ASCII characters, so I need to add istrip to the stty parameters. Now I get readable output, but all on one line because the Apple is sending just CR at the end of every line. Adding icrnl to the tty settings fixes that:

stty </dev/ttyUSB0 300 -parenb istrip icrnl; cat /dev/ttyUSB0

PR#0 brings the display back to the Apple II screen, where I can start EDASM again, enter PR#2 and ASM FIRST PROGRAM, and see if I get a listing in my terminal window on the Unix box:

SOURCE FILE: FIRST PROGRAM
0000:            1 * MY FIRST EDASM
0000:            2 *
----- NEXT OBJECT FILE NAME IS FIRST PROGRAM.OBJ0
9000:            3         ORG  $9000
FDED:            4 COUT    EQU  $FDED     ;CHAR OUTPUT ROUTINE
9000:A9 C8       5         LDA  #'H
9002:20 ED FD    6         JSR  COUT      ;A VERY SHORT "HELLO"
9005:            7 * RTS
9005:4C D0 03    8         JMP  $3D0

 *** SUCCESSFUL ASSEMBLY: NO ERRORS

  FDED COUT           FDED COUT

Brilliant! Well, except for the speed. The Apple assembler is not the fastest in the world, but it’s a lot faster than 300 bps! That optional DevCtlStrg parameter to the PR# command must be what I need to change the speed.

The EDASM manual gives an example of using a control string for a parallel printer that includes a sequence of Ctrl-I followed by 80N to set the printer width. The Apple IIc techref says that port 2 accepts commands using Ctrl-A, and the command character followed by nnB sets the bit rate, with 15B setting it to 19200 bps (apparently the fastest speed the ROM supports). So we try:

  • Apple II: PR#2,<Ctrl-A>15B
  • Unix: stty </dev/ttyUSB0 19200 min 1 -parenb istrip icrnl; cat /dev/ttyUSB0

And voila, a superfast assembly listing! (Faster even than listing to the Apple II screen; it seems that the assembler isn’t so slow after all.)

I can of course redirect the output of cat to a file if I want to keep a copy of the listing, but during the course of program development I’m happy enough just using the terminal window scrollback to scroll through it.

Conclusion

It was a lot more work than I had expected to get EDASM to the point where I can use it effectively, so as to be able to write more than trivial programs with it without too much pain. But it was certainly an interesting adventure. My two take-aways from this are:

  1. Swapping between the editor and assembler is annoyingly slow; I now see why co-resident assembly was such a good feature.
  2. 80-column printed listings are an important, perhaps primary tool when developing on systems with small (960 character) screens, perhaps especially if you don’t have a visual editor. (Though I don’t find using a line editor so bad, possibly because I used line editors a lot in the early '80s.)
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ha ha! Great adventure, and thanks for the writeup!

Thanks for doing that, too!

That was a great read - thanks!

Do not underestimate how slow these machines were. I/O crushes these things.

Even screen I/O. A 19200 baud “printer” is particularly fast.

Now, mind, back in the day, while a printer might support 19200 baud, fat chance of it actually printing at the speed. But your computer can drain a 19200 baud port and wait for more. 1920 Bps. That’s probably faster than the local disk drives are. (I don’t know about the Apple, but the Atari disk was very slow – 600 Bps, I know the C64 was no speed demon). The redeeming qualities of old school floppies were a) random access, b) faster than tape. “Faster than tape” is a low barrier to hurdle.

Now, you’d think that a memory mapped screen – how slow can that be? Sure, when you scroll 40x24, roughly 1K, that’s a simple block move, shifting the screen buffer by 40 bytes.

But if you only have, say, 20 character lines, that’s a lot of scrolling. Every 20 bytes, you eat a 1K buffer move. Now you’re starting to really eat bandwidth. 100 line listing, what’s nominally 2000 bytes of data is actually 100K of screen moves.

Vs the printer, where it’s simply pouring data out the port. It’s a lot less copying.

But it’s nice to see folks working on real hardware.

Nowhere near. The Atari 8-bitters and the Commodore VIC-20/C64/etc. were unusual amongst late-70s/early-80s microcomputers in having a slow serial interface between the drives and the computer, which is what made them so slow. The Apple is directly connected to the drive controller via the system data bus and thus doesn’t suffer from such limitations. It has no problem reading a full track (4 KB) in a couple of revolutions: 4 KB in 1/150 of a second = over 600 KB/sec. (Actually, it could even read a track in one revolution if programmed correctly, though DOS and ProDOS didn’t do this for reasons unrelated to the disk hardware itself. In fact, any drive interface must be able to write a track in a single revolution or you wouldn’t be able to format disks!) The main limit on larger reads was the head seek time.

To get some sense of the overall speed, I just formatted a diskette on my Apple IIc. The portion where it writes all 35 empty tracks took about 20 seconds, so the overall speed was around 70 7 KB/sec, or the equivalant of somewhere around 70,000 bps over a serial line.

EDIT: I’ve just timed the ADTPro format routine, which is more efficient than DOS 3.3, and it does 35 tracks in about 9 seconds, after the head reset, so call it 16 KB/sec for sequential read/write across multiple adjacent tracks, if you’re willing to do full-track reads or writes. (Or probably even if not; again, head seek time dominates.)

(That said, while the maximum speed the code in ROM will set, 19,200, is only a quarter the speed of a disk, the UARTS themselves will very reliably do 115,200 bps with no need for flow control, so the serial port can indeed be faster than the disk.)

To be frank, I have to question methodology here.

Looking at some legacy Dr. Dobbs magazines, there was a benchmark comparing CP/M Plus (CPM 3) to CP/M 2.2. And they were getting about 2600 BYTEs per second on a 4Mhz Z80 with 8" Shugarts during writes. (I didn’t catch the read speeds for the CP/M test.)

Here is a benchmark for an IBM AT: PC Mag - Google Books (hopefully that works for others).

For their sequential writes they were getting about 2850 Bytes per second. 5K/s during reads. (They were getting about 25K/s for writes and 50K/s for reads against a hard drive. Hard to be precise with the bar graphs.)

While the Apple should certainly be faster than the Atari and Commodore, I’d be surprised if it’s faster than an IBM AT.

For sure, random writes will be slower than a format. A format is the best possible case for write speed.

But truly random writes might well be dominated by seek time, which says little about the disk controller or the filesystem.

Nonetheless, I completely believe that Apple’s floppy interface, which is direct and designed by Woz, will outperform any retro system with serial-attached floppies, in any suitable benchmark. (One exception I can think of is operations on Commodore systems which can be completely contained at the drive end of the serial connection.)

Acorn’s machines, which I’m most familiar with, used a conventional approach with a floppy disk controller chip - either the older 8271 or the newer 1770 family.

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I’ve just tweaked the head post to add min 1 to the stty parameters. This is needed to ensure that the subsequent cat won’t exit immediately if there are no data to be read. This is actually the default setting, but ADTPro changes it to min 0 and does not set it back, so previously if you’d used ADTPro before setting up to see listings cat would immediately (and perhaps mysteriously) exit.

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First, this post is quite a deed!

You got me there… (What kind of address is this?) :slight_smile:

More seriously, regarding the differences when starting a program from the monitor or from the prompt (Do we need a new line? Should we exit by RTS or by a jump to BASIC?): you may want inspect the top two values on the processor stack (PLA), whether there is a return address to the monitor or not, and push them back onto the stack (PHA) in order to not to disturb anything. This way, you may set some sort of flag and support both modes.

Something like this:

; MFLG: some memory location used as a flag (0/1)
; RETL, RETH: return address (back to monitor) to compare with

FROMMON:
   LDA #0
   STA MFLG    ;initialize flag
   PLA
   CMP #RETH   ;pull and compare first address byte
   BNE EXIT2   ;not equal - restore and leave
   TAX         ;move it to X reg.
   PLA
   CMP #RETL   ;pull second byte and compare it
   BNE EXIT1   ;not equal - restore both bytes and leave
   INC MFLG    ;set flag (was called from the monitor)
EXIT1:
   PHA         ;restore low byte
   TXA
EXIT2:
   PHA         ;restore high byte

; this is not supposed to be a subroutine,
; but to be executed right at the beginning.
; (as a subroutine, we had to pull two bytes
; from the stack first, our own return address,
; save it and push it back onto the stack,
; before we leave.)
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That’s a good thought! But, as it turns out in the end, not really necessary. It seems that both BASICs and even EDASM set something appropriately such that the DOS entry hook at $3D0 Just Works, taking you back to BASIC or the EDASM prompt, if you did your .BRUN MY PROGRAM.OBJ0 from there. So that seems the best way to exit the program.

And the other issue is solved by simply printing a newline at the start. :-P

But it was such a pain to type this on a tablet – you must use it! :slight_smile:

Oh my! It seems that forty years of “improving” our computers has made them worse!

I had in fact just come here to mention that after about fifty assemblies (the assembler helpfully increments the #000000 in the ASMIDSTAMP file every time you assemble something) of five different (fairly small) programs, I’m about ready to put an end to this experiment.

The largest pain is probably just working on a 40×24 screen, with the width being a bigger problem than the length. That could probably be improved somewhat if EDASM were better about printing things in a nicely formatted way, though. What with the way it lays things out and particularly the broken auto-tab-stops for full-line comments, it’s not making particularly good use of what little screen real-estate there is. (And yes, my Apple IIc has a built-in 80-column card, but EDASM doesn’t know how to use it.) Well, at least the having (virtual) printouts makes things bearable, otherwise it would be a nightmare.

But the speed is also an issue. Not really the speed of the asssembler itself, but the speed of the disk I/O necessary to use it. For a 63 line (1 KB) program, it goes like this:

  1. 10 s: Save file.
  2. 16 s: Wait for assembler to load. Press a key.
  3. 17 s.: Wait for assembly to complete. Press a key.
  4. 5 s.: Wait for editor to reload.
  5. 5 s.: Load and run the assembled program.

So really it’s close to a minute to turn things around, whereas in my cross-development system I’m used to waiting no more than 3-4 seconds after pressing s to save my code before I see the output of the unit tests. Not to mention that those “PRESS ANY KEY” prompts that I need to respond to twice in the middle of all of that (to give me an opportunity to switch diskettes) really add to the annoyance. I am almost tempted to reverse engineer the binary far enough to remove those.

Still, it’s nice to have concrete, recent experience to make clear to me how good my life is now (so long as I don’t use a tablet!).

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In that benchmark they were reading a “200K data file.” The PC stores 9 KB per cylinder (512 bytes × 9 sectors × 2 sides) as opposed to the Apple’s 4 KB, but it’s still got to do a fair number of head seeks for a file that size, especially when you take into account DOS overhead to read the FAT (potentially multiple times).

I would be very surprised if head seeks were significantly faster on a PC 5.25" drive than on Apple 5.25" drives; the mechanisms are very similar. (The big difference is in the electronics on the drive.) So no, I’m not surprised that the Apple, when using efficient code, is not entirely dissimilar in speed to the IBM AT when reading or writing files spread across multiple tracks. In optimum conditions (raw reads with no filesystem), the PC shouldn’t be more than about twice as fast, when head seeks dominate.

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Well that’s kind of the point of the benchmark. Something that measures the entirety of the “disk reading” experience. Most of the time, they write these files on to empty diskettes to avoid fragmentation.

Efficient code has little to do with these benchmarks. The vast majority of the time is spent in internal I/O routines (MS-DOS in this case), so even though the benchmarks are written in BASIC, the CPU cost of BASIC is marginal in this case. An equivalent assembly language program I doubt would clock much faster than a BASIC one. Perhaps raw sector I/O is faster, but that’s not a reasonable test as most users would never do that, they’d rely on the BIOS/BDOS/OS to do it.

What’s the capacity of the Apple floppy disk? 80K? 160K? On the AT they were 1.2MB. (PC was 360K). That suggests that 200K is ~16% of the floppy that has to be written. In contrast to an Apple floppy where it it’s a larger percentage, thus more dominated by head seek and rotational delay.

But then, we don’t have to actually theorize. You have an authentic Apple II and floppy drives. Care to throw together a simple BASIC program that reads and writes some reasonable number of sequential bytes (50K?) on a fresh diskette and tell us what you get?

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@whartung You seem to be agreeing with me that we should be looking at reads of many tracks, not just one. That’s great!

My floppy format test above wrote 35 tracks in 9 sec, or about 260 ms./track. Now it has to write each track in a single revolution (that’s the nature of formatting floppies), taking 3.33 ms., so even if you throw in several more rotations for verification reads, clearly this is completely dominated by seek time. The Apple II and original IBM PC use essentially the same physical disk mechanism, so you’d expect both to spend most of their time waiting for seeks to settle, rather than actual writing or running DOS code.

And the numbers bear that out; my maximum-possible-write-speed format test above writes 140 K in 9 s, 15 K/sec.; decent copy programs are not much slower. The fastest result from the PC Magazine benchmark (sequential read, with DD and QD being within 10% or so of each other) reads 200 KB in around 40 sec., 5 K/sec. Give the PC plenty of leeway for any kind of overhead and you’ve probably got about the same speed. (Or if you want a more accurate comparison, format a floppy on a PC 360 KB drive and tell us how long it takes.) You can pretty much ignore interleave and the rest; a track taking 20 ms. to read instead of 3 ms. makes little difference when you’re waiting a quarter second every time you need to change tracks.

I don’t think that the PC Magazine benchmarks were written in BASIC, but regardless, “efficient code” does make a huge difference for the Apple. With Apple BASIC the DOS hijacks the keyboard character input routine and feeds data from the disk character by character to an INPUT statement. This is many, many times slower than using assembly to call the DOS code directly to read or write 256 byte chunks.

(This seems to be turning into a different topic; perhaps a moderator can move all of the posts related to floppy speeds of non-Apple-II machines to a different thread.)

For reference, there’s a disassembled source for the EDASM editor/assembler here: markpmlim · GitHub

Cheers,
Andy

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Note that that’s a different EDASM: the ProDOS version.

If anybody’s got a link to the source for or a disassembly of the DOS 3.3 version that would be quite useful to me. I recently thought I might speed things up by using a RAM disk (in slot 3, as DOS sees it), but it turns out that EDASM always loads the editor and assembler from the disk in ,S6,D1, even when EDASM.OBJ is started from the RAM disk, and the SLOT 3 command doesn’t change this. Looks like fixing that would need a patch.

Thanks for a great post. Very informative - I am interested in self hosted editors and assemblers for a retro project I am working on.

What is the model of that Apple II ?

Is it an Apple IIc? - just that the keyboard looks a bit odd.