Back online

After a couple of months off we're finally back to it...    and I have started with a problem.   The "hard disc" on the BB XM that is a USB flash drive has suddenly started corrupting files when saving.  Thankfully I have a backup of most things (and more are being taken!)   My first thought is to switch to a more traditional external USB laptop hard disc instead of the pen drive, but I don't know if this will help as the drivers would be the same.

The last release of the assembler was affected with VFPLib (the basic source for generating the lookup tables) corrupted within the TBAFS archive.

Hopefully I can figure out what is going on as this is the worst kind of problem to have.  I guess it's just a side-effect of running a development version of an operating system and drivers...

BASIC VFP Assembler 0.05

Version 0.05 of the BASIC VFP/SIMD assembler has been released for download

• Fixed VLDM/VSTM register list size

BASIC VFP Assembler 0.04

Version 0.04 of the BASIC VFP/SIMD assembler has been released for download

• Fixed VLDx/VSTx syntax error due to missing comma
• Fixed register type case-sensitivity
• Fixed listing missing final character
• Fixed optional 'ignored' data-type on data-processing instructions
• Fixed condition codes

Holiday Time

Things are a bit delayed at the moment as the holiday season takes over.   There has been some great feedback on the assembler and I hope to get another version out soon.   Like everyone else I'm away for quite a lot of August and also September, so it's slowing development right down.   We'll be back with an update as soon as there is something to report.

VFP Assembler 0.03

Another update to the VFP Assembler today with release 0.03.

* Fixed optional data-type variations - ARM p285
   (Note the use of multiple data-types is still not supported)
* Removed need to set sz in internal tables for F64/F32 variations)
* Fixed use of register lists in VTBL
* Other minor improvements to code and documentation

VFP Assembler Update

Shortly after 0.01 comes version 0.02 of the VFP/SIMD assembler with a number of bug fixes:

* Fixed VLDR/VSTR <reg>,<expr> not supported
* Fixed SP,LR,PC ARM register names
* Fixed user integer without R# prefix for ARM register numbers
* Other minor fixes
* Updates to documentation and release notes

Tested with the TestVFP script and a manual scan of output created by ObjAsm / DecAof

(Note the BASIC version in VFPLib supports the VLDR fix but not the ARM register names)

VFP assembler known bug list

Testing has thrown up some bugs that we are working on fixing:

* SP,PC,LR not supported as ARM core register names

* "R" prefix should be optional for an ARM core register, supporting existing syntax
   (We are verifying this doesn't cause other issues with similar pattern variations, leading to syntax errors)
   (The pattern table order will have to be updated to ensure bad-register errors occur at the correct time)

* LDR reg,<expr> not working due to missing pattern variation
   (<lbl> will be a new op name in the pattern tables to support an R15 based offset matching <#+-10>)

I suspect there will be more as there are a lot of (perfectly necessary) assembler directives that add complexity to the otherwise fairly simple syntax.