Picax - Pic 16C84 Assembler
(c) Nick Veitch, James Cleverdon.



What is Picax?
Simply,  it  is an assembler for PIC16C84 ASM files.  It turns the standard
assembly  language files into .hex files, which can then be programmed into
a  PIC  with  the appropriate hardware and AmigaPP, or just about any Amiga
PIC software.

The only special things to note are:

* It assumes a PIC16C84 - don't put any PIC = 16C84 statements, or anything
in your ASM files, they will generate errors.

* It has many predefined EQU statments - basically, this does away with the
need  for  loads of includes and header files.  Standard labels like PORT_A
etc  are predefined.  If you try to define them again, you will generate an
error.   to  check  the list of predefined EQUs, type picax -d (or perhaps,
more usefully, picax -d >RAM:plop, so you can read the file at leisure

*  It  will  generate  a standard .lst file as well as a hex file, which is
quite handy

*  At  the  moment,  it  only  supports hex values in the form 0x....  E.g.
MOVLW  0x0C  is  a valid statment, but MOVLW 0Ch will not be recognised.  I
only mention this because a lot of source uses this second format.


Requirements

As  far  as  I  can work out, this should work on just about any Amiga.  It
doesn't  require  any  libraries  or anything, and it should work under any
revision of Workbench, though this hasn't been tested.  It was developed on
an  A4000  with 060/PPC, and certainly works on this platform.  If you have
any  bug  reporst,  you  can  email  them to me at amormat@futurenet.co.uk,
putting  "PICAX" in the subject line.  
I will be setting up a PicAX website (check out Amiga Format for more info)
where you can download the latest updates etc., and hopefully download lots
of source codes and projects.
There  is no '040fpu or PPC version because, lets face it, even a 68000 can
assemble  a  1k hex file in about, oh half a second.  If someone ever comes
up with a good reason, then I'll do a PPC version.


Distribution/Copyright

It  is  completely  free,  though  I won't complain if you send me some PIC
chips, or bottles of whiskey or anything. I would be very interested to see
any projects you actually use this software for, particularly Amiga related
ones.   You can contact me at the Amiga Format address (30 Monmouth Street,
Bath BA1 2BW)



Future

The   main   thing   I  will  be  working  on  is  some  proper  Amigaguide
documentation, and hopefully a whole PIC programming Amigaguide.
The  software  itself  works, but I would like to add support for the other
way  of  expressing  hex values (see above), an option to turn the internal
definitions off, and to make a simple GUI.

Picax History

Picax  began  life  as a prog called Picasm by James Cleverdon, on the UNIX
platform.   It has been actually quite heavily modified to run on the Amiga
without  resort  to  evil  libraries etc., and I also decided to change the
name, as there are at least three Amiga programs called PICasm.
It was first compiled for the Amiga in April 1998.


Nick Veitch
13th May, 1998