I'm converting some code from ADE to BeebASM 1.04 (on Linux) and I've got a silly question. Unfortunately "beebasm" is too common in this forum to search on...!

In ADE I can do things like

And then later

Is it possible to define strings in this way with BeebASM ? I tried the obvious

and this failed...

Similarly, in ADE I can do

A nice mix of integer and strings... can this be done in BeebASM?

I'm sure Rich TW will be along in a second, but if you want to store the sequence of bytes that make up the string with a label pointing to the first character, in BeebASM you use EQUS, the same as you would on a real Beeb.

Hello!

No, unfortunately this isn't possible in BeebAsm - the only supported type of string is a string literal, i.e. a string in quotes. The closest you could get I guess would be to use a macro to expand to EQUS "yourstring", e.g.


A little weird perhaps, but it kinda has the same effect.

I didn't bother with too much high-level support for strings, as they're not normally so important in assembly language programs, but I hope that's a reasonable enough work-around!

By the way, macros only appeared in a more recent version of BeebAsm (I don't think they're in 1.04), so you might have to compile the latest version - hopefully this is not too big a problem though.

Yeah, once I updated to 1.08 (see crossthread), I ended up with a solution similar to that:



"compile_date" is basically a "build" number for my internal testing so I can be sure the latest ROM was loaded into SWR to test against It's built in the Makefile

VERSIONSTRING should be a.bc (eg 1.23) so the ROM header's version string is either exactly four characters (eg "1.23") or exactly 18 characters (eg "1.23 (12 Jan 2013)", eg:
EQUS "ROM TITLE"
EQUB 0
EQUS "1.23 (12 Jan 2013)"
.copyrightoffset
EQUB 0
EQUS "(C)Author Name"
EQUB 0

Colour me confused; where did this requirement come from? I never saw this BITD. Admittedly, about 85% of the ROMs (112 out of 135) I collected BITD follow your spec, but not all.

Heh, seem's even Acorn didn't follow that standard all the time

No, I agree this is not an Acorn guideline and certainly not a requirement. Probably it's an attempt to try to retroactively apply some consistency to 'new' sideways ROMs, but, for example, the verbose form which includes the date is very much a RISC OS thing - this was the preferred format for module headers.