Michael Black wrote:

<snip>
>There did seem to be some migration the other way.  Since the Apple
>monitor was out there in assembly format (Steve Wozniak published
>various bits in Dr. Dobbs, and then the whole thing was in the back
>of the Apple manual), I think people tended to adapt it to other
>computers.  I had the disassembler running on my OSI Superboard,
>and then later added the Apple mini-assembler.  I think I eventually
>added some other bits of the monitor.  Likewise, I thought Jim Butterfield
>used the disassembler and mini-assembler in his Commodore 64 monitor
>that was printed in Compute! magazine.  I can't remember if he stated
>he had, I noticed a similarity, or I just assumed.

In the case of the mini-assembler, if it was Apple II-derived, there could
be no doubt.

The Apple II mini-assembler has a structure which, to my knowledge,
is unique in mocrocomputerdom.  It simply starts incrementing an
"opcode" byte in the destination location, _disassembling_ it after
each increment, until it matches what the user typed in!  It then
fills in the operand address byte(s), if any, and disassembles it
again to the screen.

So it is a completely "implicit" assembler, based on a disassembler!
This makes it extermely compact (and slow, but plenty fast enough
for manually typed input).

-michael

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