Sharp PC-G850 assembly experience

[fleseriutiberiu]

Hey all,

I have a passion for Z80 assembly on portable devices and gave the 850 a go, I loved the combination of a highly portable Z80 systems for which programming is done directly on the device, rather than using a cross-assembler (doing the code on a PC and then downloading it to the Z80 system).
However I found that some of the routines that are used to show the contents of the registries for debugging purposes are not that useful, the contents are often altered and I think that is because the routines that you call to display the register contents are using those registers and will not reflect what your initial program put in those registers.
Has anyone else used this machine for Z80 assembly and what was your experience?

REgards,
Tibi

[engelen]

I have no complaints about the assembler and monitor of the PC-G850VS. The monitor shows the correct register values, but does not show the auxiliary registers.

Perhaps you have an interrupt routine activated that alters registers before display?

Registers are displayed with monitor break points. There is also a ROM routine that displays registers: CALL 0xbd03

PS. I wrote Forth850 in Z80 assembly from scratch using the as80 assembler. Writing assembly routines for Forth850 is relatively easy with the built-in assembler to define Forth words in Z80 code. See the examples on how that works.

- Robert

[fleseriutiberiu]

Hey Robert,

The axact BD03 routine I have been using to check the registers and it always alters their content just have a go at writing a small assembly program that populates whatever values in the resgisters and then call BD03. You can even do a test of calling BD03 before your run your program just to see how identical the register values are befor and post your register altering program And it doesn't matter if you run your prgram from run mode or monitor mode. Ieven tried on a G802 and I get the same behaviour.

Tibi