Pscience5 Forum

wquatan · Joined: 14 Feb 2006 Posts: 3

Maybe slightly offtopic here, but I'm looking for a Windows-based Assembler for ARM (Psion) and which allows me to assemble OPX's

Any Ideas ? Just references would already be a great help. Of course "more" is even better Smile

Thanks

Vor · Joined: 01 Sep 2005 Posts: 19 Location: Madrid, Spain

Well... this is not exactly what you want, but i know two programs to code in assembler for ER5. I hope it will be of some help to you.

First one (and newer one) is Assembleur5, by Dominique Sevaille. An epoc program which will let you make opx files in arm assembler. It's in french, but has very good doc, and examples. I have it half-translated to english.
But it has some limitations. the opx will ocuppy 14 kb (At least), because it uses a model. And also i'm pretty sure that you can only have 1 function. So you call the opx, giving it the data, and you recieve the result. That's all...
Webpage: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/psions5-3495/
Download: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/psions5-3495/ExcePsion/Assembleur.zip
or here: http://dcabuzel.free.fr/bin5/assembleur5.zip

The other one (my favourite) is ASM, by Henrik Bjerregaard. It has an opx (MC OPX), which must be loaded, and provides some functions to load an extension file, which is the one you have compiled, and has the assembler code. You can export the labels in the asm-code, that want to be called from the opl program, you assign them a handle, and using the mc.opx functions you are able to use them.. Its a very good opx, imhp. It has an asm editor, for editing and compiling the sources. And good documentation. (It's opensource)
You can also, for example, manipulate memory buffers from within the assembler code.. It has many possibilities..

Also it brings another opx, (WGFX OPX), Which in words of his author: allows the pixels in a bitmap to be accessed directly from OPL or from assembled code. It brings an example, drawing a mandelbrot fractal from assembly code.
Homepage: http://login.dknet.dk/~henrik/psion.html
Dl...: http://login.dknet.dk/~henrik/download/asm.tgz

Of course you can't call the Operating System from assembler. the O/S is written in C++ and there is no way AFAIK you can call the O/S. There is not a system calls list anywhere, you know. I whish it would be...

The only information regarding some efforts about this issue, that i've found on the web, comes from Matt Gumbley (http://www.gumbley.me.uk/crypt/epoc-forth.html) and his efforts on porting hforth to epoc, using C, C++ and assembly.
Look at: http://www.gumbley.me.uk/crypt/epoc-mix.html

regards,
José Luis

Jonas · Joined: 13 Jul 2005 Posts: 95 Location: Gemany

Many thanks for the Links, José!

I never heard of them before...

Jonas