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ASM > Looking for a decent assembler

#177592 - commodorejohn - Fri Sep 07, 2012 3:06 am

So I'd like to experiment with NDS homebrew, and after having perused some of the available documentation I'm ready to try some actual GBA or NDS coding. However, I'd like to find a better assembler than GAS, which I'm not at all fond of.

My only real requirements are that it support a Devpac-style incbin directive (the lack of which is the primary thing I hate about GAS) and the full instruction set for the NDS CPUs, and be available or able to be built on Win32 (I can live with building an executable in MinGW, though I'd much rather just be able to download a binary.) Interoperability with C compilers is not a concern.

I've seen Goldroad and I know it supports incbin and the GBA ARM7 at least, but it does seem to be fairly old (last update seems to be from 2001?) and I don't know enough about the architecture yet to have any idea whether the NDS ARM9 includes features Goldroad doesn't support.

Any suggestions?

#177598 - Dwedit - Fri Sep 07, 2012 5:29 pm

There is an incbin directive in GAS, but it can't specify a start position and length.

When using the devkitpro makefiles, the assembler has the current directory set to the "build" directory instead of the source code directory. Include and incbin become relative the build directory instead of the source code directory. But #include (handled by the preprocessor) still works correctly.
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