Has anyone ever seen a z80 assembler that uses alternative mnemonics, or is everyone satisfied with the official ones? Not sure if this is a sticking point for people getting into z80 asm or not.
I suspect a lot of people bought a z80 as faster 8080 and never bothered with
any kind of assembler. I remember ads for 2500 A.D. assembler being a better system so it may have used alternative memonics.
ah, well most of them don’t look too bad anyway except for example the inc/dec variations where I’d prefer the 65x style INX/INY.
Might be confused with the Z80’s IN I/O instruction, though.
There’s nothing stopping people from using Intel 8080 syntax with the Z80. If you stuck with the stock tools that came with CP/M, they only understood Intel mnemonics.
In the olden times, before the Zilog Assembly mnemonics were standardized, people used their own extensions to the 8080 mnemonics. Roger Amidon of TDL and Epson QX-10 fame wrote the Zap monitor or Zapple in such a dialect. It can still be found online.
What year did the standard come out?
When the Z80 CPU came out in 1976, the computer world looked very different from these modern times. There was no generic common computer platform for which you could write and distribute an assembler and be done with it. Instead you had to deliver your own development platform (example: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Zilog/Zilog.Z80.1976.102646104.pdf). The CP/M probably preferred to adapt existing assemblers than starting anew.
On this site: TDL Apple and Zapple monitor & tools it is related that at the announcement of the Z80 CPU there were no mnemonics available. These probable came with the chips and datasheets.
So the time frame is between announcement and availability.
Fred Jan
Ah yeah, I’m now convinced that the biggest sticking point for z80 beginners is simply getting ahold of the Zaks textbook.
They really should reprint it - the prices are going up.
Zaks isn’t (and wasn’t) the only writer of popular programming texts. Lance Leventhal also covered a number of processors.
It looks like Leventhal doesn’t bother the would-be Z80 programmer or system designer with any sketch of the innards of the machine. A good call, I think.’
To save paper when most people didn’t need to know it, sure. But now that the original z80 is going away it’s become more important for preservation.
Intel had copyrights for its 8080 mnemonics so Zilog was forced to come up with their own alternative to avoid any legal problems. Since they were changing things anyway, they tried to clean it up a little and make it easier to integrate all their new instructions.
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