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Homebrew game for C64 - part 5: C64 / 6502 IDE for Mac

S
o far I've not written very much about the actual gameplay. That's mostly because I had done a bit of that before I started writing this blog. I will write some of that up 'retro'spectively. (geddit?)

But I've been choosing to do other things such as the music and whilst doing that I got hung up on writing a system for converting music notation to assembly.

I've been muddling by with a miscellany of tools (TMPx, an online sprite editor, XCode etc). This has been working pretty efficiently, with a few frustrations. So today I decided to begin work on an IDE for Mac, which AFAIK doesn't exist.
Not bad for a day's work.  The syntax colouring alone makes the assembly so much easier to read. The line numbering probably took more time than the rest put together. You never know what's going to go smoothly and what you'll be stuck on for hours.

But is this just displacement activity?? Am I avoiding getting on with the gameplay because I'm having doubts about the original concept? Maybe. But I'm reminded of this:

(image links to XKCD - go visit and spend time there.)

That seems very appropriate this evening.

If the IDE interests you, do let me know.

[update 28 Mar: Build / Run / Build+Run working, from menu or using same keyboard shortcuts as XCode. 'Build' uses tmpx and expects that to be installed, passes the resulting .prg (if build successful) to X64, Vice emulator]

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  1. Unknown17 November 2019 at 23:33

    Great work. Do you know the Sublime text editor on the Mac? It has a Kick Assembler plugin which gives syntax highlighting. I'd be totally lost without syntax highlighting. The first time I saw it was in Turbo Pascal for DOS, I was amazed. Wish I'd had it when I was writing 6502 on the 64 back in the 80s...

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    1. peahen18 November 2019 at 01:46

      Thank you. I don't know Sublime but I'll take a look. I've done a little Z80 recently and found the TextMate editor and a plugin for the zasm assembler, which works well but doesn't appear to have a dark mode as far as I can see. The assembler I'm using for 6502 is Turbo Macro Pro and I've done quite a bit of work with that now and so I'm 'bought into' its syntax.

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