Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Disassembler for use with WozMon

 

Disassembler disassembling WozMon

WozMon is a great little monitor program in 256 bytes which Steve Wozniak wrote for his Apple 1 release in 1976.  It was small but powerful allowing for memory inspection, entry of 6502 machine code programs and bytes, and launching of programs in ROM and RAM (jumping to address).

But being small, it is missing features that monitor users have learned to depend on, including a mini-assembler and disassembler.

So here I am today presenting a disassembler I wrote for 6502 which can be integrated with WozMon run command.  Once the disassembler gets control, the Y register contains a pointer to the last character read from the input buffer, and continues parsing for a hex address.  If not found, it simply returns to WozMon.  But if found, it will disassemble 20 statements starting at that address.  (Note: Vic-20 port above, changed to 17 statements due to the smaller screen size).

The syntax may be lengthier than other monitors, but it allows for an integration with the normally ROM based WozMon without modifications.  Plus you get what you pay for.   The disassembler is open source, so feel free to change it.

The disassembler came into being as part of developing a mini-assembler.  First I'd written a prototype in C# .NET. 

The assembler included tables of information for the 6502 instruction set and addressing modes that lent itself to be used as a disassembler (came second) which was prototyped as a 6502 program that disassembles itself.  Third came the disassembler compatible for use with WozMon.

Each prototype and program is one step along the way for the goal of creating a mini-assembler for my 6502 minimal system.  Not there yet, but getting closer with each step!

Also works with original WozMon in Apple 1 style environment

Also works on C64 and C128 systems


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