The legendary microprocessor Motorola M6809 had an official assembler
called as9 needed for
classic 6809 sources.
This was ported to MS-DOS by a man named E.J.Rupp.
From those sources only one set survived on the Internet,
as part of a distribution of a fig-Forth.
The author Mike Pashea of (then) Southern Illinois University had the
foresight to pack the assembler with the Forth,
and even the sources,
though he changed them without documenting the changes.
This is not all.
The archiver used arc has fallen into obscurity,
and the versions of arc that I had (5.1,4.1) couldn't unpack
those sources.
Somehow I managed to find a version that could.
So I thought to do the community a service by making the source portable
accross Linux-gcc and TurboC,
adding the executable programs and
repacking into the ubiquitous zip format.
This package you can
download
here,
with
documentation
there.
The main reason that this package is worth the effort is that it is
the official Motorola assembler.
This implements the instruction set as documented in "MC6809-MC6809E
Microprocessor Programming Manual (c) Motorola 1981".
You will not find that on the Internet,
I'm the proud owner of what appears to be a first generation
fotocopy.
It can be used to assemble some classic sources,
as well as my 6809 version of ciforth.
The second reason is that it is meticulously documented in as11v2.pdf
with respect to the assembler directives or pseudocodes,
and the way expressions are built up.
However there are some bugs and my changes.
You may be surprised, given that the assembler is hard to find.
The reason is that Motorola documented her assemblers together,
and this document, maintained for more than 20 years, still contains
a 6809 chapter, besides processors that are more popular, like the 6811.
(The m6809 still appears in the 2003 Conrad catalog.)
There are other 6809 assemblers on the internet,
like a gcc version, and the
solid work as09_130.zip
of Frank Vorstenbosch.
You can find those, and more, from Alan DeKok's 6809 Page, now defunct.
However an archived version can still be found
here
I advise against conversions.
It is a great pain regards pseudo code,
and a great danger regards subtle differences.
Starting out with more than thousands errors is not uncommon,
e.g. the regression test of Vorstenbosch give errors in more
than one fifth of the lines, if run through as9.
Typically, conversion to and from gnu-assemblers is worse,
because not even the opcodes are respected.
And e.g. the .Intel_syntax directive was only recently added
(as per 2.13.90.xx).
Regardless it gives errors on all lines that contain comment introduced by
a semicolon (;), for my ciforth source this is over 90% of the lines.
Forth-assemblers typically have radical differences, too.
MY CHANGES TO THE C-SOURCE
The assembler as9 doesn't support blank space within expressions,
and assumes that anything past a valid expression is comment,
not even needing a comment character.
Because nowadays this is greatly unexpected, and a pitfall,
I added a warning about comment that doesn't start with a comment
character.
(Dark shades of the past. It was not until 2004 that the gcc
family of assembler outputs a warning for that,
after I sent in a bug report.)
This was not entirely successful,
see also the bugs and more technical comments in
my changes document
This was the only real change.
I got rid of the crashes, of course, and
I made sure that MS-DOS text files can be handled without modification.
I left the triple use of *, as a comment introducer, an operator
and the current program counter.
You will find a file as9n.c in the source archive.
This is an alternative to as9.c if your library doesnot
contain the strncasecmp() function.
Rename and use as needed.
CLASSIC 6809 MATERIAL
The official Motorola M6809 assembler as9 is to be used
to assemble
the famous assist09.asm Motorola monitor program and the
forth9.asm
6809 figforth implementation,
that you can
download here, in MS-DOS text format.
It is also used for the 6809 version of ciforth