Cameron Kaiser, maintainer of André Fachat’s fast and portable two-pass 6502/65816 crossassembler, has released the latest version: xa (xa65) 2.4.0.
It runs on Un*xy things and Windows (with Cygwin or msys2 or similar), and probably other operating systems as well. xa 2.3 has had a good run, but it’s served 17 years as the minor release (no joke: 2.3.0 came out in 2006) and time marches on. There are new features to add and old cruft to sweep away. But it’s still compatible with all the systems 2.3 was compatible with and adds several new features, including:
- Listing mode, allowing side-by-side byte output with the lines in your source. You can even emit it in HTML.
- A ca65 compatibility mode that allows many of the same pseudo-ops and “cheap local labels” support. Although this obviously doesn’t accept every feature in ca65, it can ease translating your assembly source considerably — because once you switch to xa, you won’t want to go back. 🙂 This feature is also used for other compatibility options such as MASM and allowing some C-like expressions.
- Assertions at the preprocessor level (#error) and assembly level (.assert), allowing controlled errors when static assertions are violated.
- Linker enhancements for .o65, including deferred linking of undefined symbols.
- You can now get the assembler major and minor version in the preprocessor with XA_MAJOR and XA_MINOR. Other predefined macros may appear in future versions.
You can read more here. You can download it and read documentation in man(1) format (converted to HTML) from the main xa65 home page.
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