Mac toolchain

[robsoft]

If anyone is interested, inspired by Keith's setup for getting stuff into an emulated Spectrum (on Windows), I've got a fairly nice setup working on Mac OS now, with bits and pieces put together so that I can go from Sublime Text (or any editor of choice really), via VASM, into FUSE (or Zesarux), making the .TAP file etc etc as you'd expect. I've also got it turning 'ascii' BASIC code into tokenised Spectrum data that also can be poured into a .TAP.

As an example, I have a hundred-or-so line BASIC program together with a couple of separate CODE sections (including a font, some UDGs and other graphics, and a handful of utility assembler routines), and I can make a change in the BASIC code in Sublime and have loaded the whole new 'tape' into back into Zesarux within a few seconds.

I might write up a blog post or something, if there's any interest. It's not rocket science of course, and I suspect anyone really interested in doing this will have sorted it out for themselves already, but I thought I'd mention it

[akuyou]

Sounds fantastic!
I don't have a mac myself, but feel free to post it on your blog, and I'll link your post on the Hello World page for any mac users who come along!

[robsoft]

Ok, thanks Keith.

Well, the basic, rather tedious and over-wrought blog posts of what I did and how it works, with a BASIC and VASM example and some stuff about recompiling the BIN2TAP, BAS2TAP and VASM tools on the Mac, starts here;

http://robsoft.net/blog/mac-to-spectrum-1-3/

I do want to take your Hello World and the monitor/toolkit stuff and get them working in it, I haven't tried yet and I'm not expecting too much trouble but once it's done I'll make a specific page just for that, so that people who might be interested can see the wood for the trees as it were. As soon as I've done that, I'll post a link here and if you also think it's suitable for linking from your own page, then that's awesome.

[mrcook]

As a mac user it feels like we get the short end of the stick when it comes to emulators and retro tools, so it's great to see there are some solutions out there. Thanks for sharing your blog Rob!

My own solution for the loader was to run a little Ruby script to merge a preprepared BASIC loader with my VASM built game binary -- not a particularly flexible solution, so those bas2tap and bin2tap utils look rather handy.

Thanks again Rob, I'm off to read your part 2 post!