Dialects

The official assembler that came with the ST. It was a CP/M-68K port, slow and lacking native macros, only for the hardest of the hard core. But this was the thing that built TOS itself.

If you look at the original TOS source code, you’re looking at AS68 source. Also brought us the original DRI format.

The first in RAM assembler. Whilst previous assemblers forced developers to load and assemble from disk, the tiny 17KB k-seka allowed you to edit and write entirely in memory. This was not a GEM UI though, it was custom and clunky, so slicker editors would give programmers a more comfortable experience, but this was a big step forward for the time.

The original SEKA was an Amiga product, but later versions were ported to the Atari ST.

The first glimmerings of light. A GEM shell. Macros. And that glorious GST object format that Metacom and Devpac would go on to use.

Compared to the mainframe like tooling that had come before, this felt like a real step forward. It did require devs to live DRI-land and migrate to GST.

The closest early replacement for AS68 if this was your thang and also wanted local labels. Also bonus of having GEM library sources on the disk.

Not the fastest tool on the shelf, but it worked with GST (and later DRI), so it plugged into the rest of Metacomco’s language stack.

Atari’s own answer to AS68: fast, macro-happy, and paired with the ALN linker. Laid down some hella funky syntax like ?1 macro args, ^^defined, and .iif. A cult classic.

You didn't have to be mad to use this (but it helped)

The first public face of what became the big daddy. Debuted the full holy trinity of editor, GenST assembler and MonST debugger. This is where life began.

What I learned from revisiting this box - HiSoft was short for "High Quality Software". Maybe they should have branded themselves HQSoft.

Data Becker / Abacus may be better known for their books (including the nobel prize winning "ST Internals"), but they had a side hustle in nifty little ST tools, like this fella. Mainly used as a supplement to their tutorial books, but had a few extra operators that set it apart from plain Motorola syntax.

Not AssemPro under another hat. Data Becker’s next integrated GEM suite — editor, macro assembler, built-in reassembler, and debugger all resident at once, so you flip between windows without reloading chunks from disk.

The ST-Computer review (02/1987) highlights tokenized (non-ASCII) source files, conditional and repeat assembly, a fat shipped macro library for GEMDOS/BIOS/XBIOS/VDI/AES, and reference tables you can browse from any module. The debugger even offered a 68020 emulation mode. Standalone binaries only — no linker objects for mixing into C toolchains.

Marky "Mark" Williams rolled out his funky bunch take on atari development with the snazzily named Mark Williams C.

The lack of an apostrophe makes this sound like a test score, not the mid 80s development kit it was.

But it didn't just do C, there was an assembler there too. Fun for the whole family!

Another side assembler as part of a C development package, the Aztec C was appropriately named as it actually has roots back in the Aztec era.

If you like calling your sections CSEG and DSEG then this will be your jam.

Some sequels far surpass the original, and the HiSoft Empire struck back in devastating fashion with this legendary package.

They posed two simple questions: "Are you a DEveloper?" and "Do you need a PAC"? If the answer to either, both or none of these questions was "hmmm ... maybe?" - this was the development package for you.

A game changer. A life changer. Devpac is life. Life is Devpac.

Fritze and Hellwig put a turbo button ON YOUR ASSEMBLER. Hold onto your bums boys as we are gonna go fast!

Originally sold commercially as Omikron.Assembler, then released as shareware TurboAss where it really picked up steam. Powering through 1.3 million lines a second, this was for developers in a hurry, not for those British Tea Drinking layabouts. But performance came with a price; not only did you have to sign away your soul and your sense of humour, but also macros and includes were on the chopping block.

Bugaboo also gained popularity in its own right as an alternative to MonST.

GFA are well known for their BASIC, but did you know they also shipped an assembler?

It wasn't just a command line either; it had a full user interface, although with some non standard controls.

ST Format readers found this on a cover disk, and probably promptly formatted it to copy the latest Automation menu onto.

Hey Joe! What are you doing with that Assembler in your hand?

Welcome to Joe’s Assembler, hand crafted by Mr Joe Treat as an Alcyon-compatible backend for Sozobon C. This did some optimising around short branches so could generate smaller object files than the competition.

Your files better not be bigger than 32K or things will get ugly. Keep it short and sweet!

Lattice pray! Devpac creators' foray into the world of C development suites came with a lot of the goodies you would expect from these legends, including a fully symbolic debugger!

Paved the road for a transition from assembly only to mixed C+asm projects.

A similar, but better product to Lattice C, especially given the quality of the C compiler.

This was a full suite of tools including an assembler, linker, debugger.

From an assembly perspective, the advantage over lattice c was the move from stdcall to fastcall. Whilst lattice passed its arguments on the stack, you could pass everything in registers with purec.

Started life as Turbo C’s MAS assembler, grew into PASM. Henk Robbers’ AHCC keeps a Pure-compatible C+asm toolchain alive.

Ziggy Stardust from the Overlanders had always been ahead of the curve, and again showed his prescience by making a 68k cross assembler on the IBM PC years before this concept took off.

Whilst the rest of the scene was still dwelling in devpac land, this slow burn production quietly gathered momentum. Later versions would be used heavily by Leonard/Oxygene, and another Overlander (Ben) would pick up the baton and take this to greater heights.

When the Falcon rolled into town, we wanted an assembler that was comfortable speaking 68030 (and 68881). Devpac 3 was the model for the falcon generation.

Compared to the solidity of devpac 2, this always felt a little rough around the edges. It crashed more. The 030 debugging experience wasn't quite as good. It missed some 030 instruction variations, so you had to dc.b them. But it was the big D. What can you say?

An ambitious French project that aimed squarely for the Falcon market. It sensed HiSoft's weaknesses and pounced. It had its own debugger (ADEBUG) and claimed 300k lines a minute assembly speed!

You didn't need a brain to use this one, but it helped.

A fork of Joe's Assembler (jas) that was distributed in the public domain.

It added some FPU ops and 32 bit multiplies/divides.

A demoscene production from Falcon sceners that launched with an as yet uncopied violet, magenta and cyan colour scheme. It burst onto the scene at Symposium 96, and impressed with a slick editor, multiple source buffers, source folding and configurable compile options.

The demo version was not an assembler in its own right, but added some markup to the source code to allow for folding. Being a Falcon production, it gave you 768 pixels of blissful text space for editing. It also came with that essential 90s accesory - a built in calculator.

Big logos. Edgy fonts. Swagger. Mark Williams dreamt of being this cool.

Don't get confused with the same named old Alcyon assembler, this was the overlanders bringing their French touch to the cross assembler scene.

Whilst Ziggy's original assembler was an early MS-DOS creation, Ben modernise things with a portable C code integrated with GNU tools to allow it to be run on a range of modern platforms.

Macro syntax is Mot-flavoured and deliberately does not match Devpac. Assemble on PC, push flat binaries to real ST hardware, this was the new workflow for sceners heading into the new millennium.

Mammoth toolkit that supports every piece of hardware under the sun, including our beloved 680x0. As sceners moved to developing atari prods on non-atari hardware, cross platform toolchains became the norm, and the GNU stuff was the big daddy. Downside - the most horrendous assembler syntax OF ALL TIME

You want to be rolling with the Microtec Research ASM68K style syntax in the 2020s? GNU got chu you fam. With this GAS variation, you can write readable code again! No more % everywhere, just smooth 68k code.

Volker and Frank are absolute kings of the cross-assembler scene, and their work took the world by storm. Their vbcc and vlink tools are popular and fast C compilers for retro machines, and their vasm assembler is the perfect backend. Supporting a wide range of architectures including our beloved atari platforms, vasm and its surrounding tools became a staple of the retro scene.

Return of MADMAC. Return of MADMAC. You knew I'd be back!

A classic is reborn. When old atari boy Landon Dyer released the source code for his old MADMAC assembler, little did he know what it would unleash. It first came to prominence in the Jaguar scene, where it was used to assemble code for the Jag's Tom and Jerry chips. Atari scene legend, GGN, later added support for atari TOS binary output and the scene clasped to their bosom and has never let go.