Re: [cc65] ca65 for stand-alone asm projects

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Ullrich von Bassewitz <uz@musoftware.de> wrote:
>  On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 10:52:41PM -0700, Agent Friday wrote:
> > [snip] IMO, if ca65 is to be used as one's primary assembler .  .  .
> > the ability to [easily] generate a very simple binary file that can be
> > loaded directly into a stock machine is a must.
>
>  ca65 is not target specific and the whole package is made so that it is easy
>  to retarget it to other platforms.
>      [snip]
>  What that means is that you have to add necessary headers yourself. . . .
>  . . this is easier than you think...

My point here is twofold.  I rely on the ability to quickly write
some assembly code and very easily assemble, load and run it.  I
don't see that going away any time soon, no matter how powerful my
development tools are.

And more importantly, every other assembler I know of for the C64
can generate a loadable binary file from a single assembler source
file with relative ease.  In fact, this is the norm from all I have
seen.  When someone discovers ca65 and decides to try it out for the
first time, I would think this is most likely the first thing they
would attempt.  It's such a common and fundamental model that it
seems there should be a quick and simple way to do, and not involve
a lot of research.

Recently a friend of mine spent many hours over the course of 2 days
trying to get a trivial bit of assembler code to just build with
ca65.  I had already been using cc65 for a few months at that point,
and I wasn't able to offer much help, even after spending hours
reading and experimenting.  I wonder how many other people have had
the same experience and ended up writing ca65 off as being
complicated or unintuitive.  This would be a shame.  I think that to
reasonably expect folks to be able to adopt ca65 for anything other
than augmenting cc65 C code requires that a new user could easily
figure out how to do what is one of the simplest things on all the other
assemblers he's used.  Am I alone in this thought?

That said, I completely understand the scarcity of time.  It just
struck me as something that would easily trip up a new user.
Anyway, I'll take a stab at it and go from there.

// Agent Friday
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