SounDemoN's Turbo Action Rom with the following improvements for turbo ass:

1. Memory layout of source buffers changed to better match the RR's memory constraints. Turbo ass can now handle larger source texts.
2. "<- v" displays current memory usage.

Note:
1. Source codes in standard turbo ass format cannot be loaded directly but can be imported with the "<-e" command.
2. There's a bug which causes the assembler to lock up when the buffers are almost full. The bug is also present in SounDemoN's version. Hence, keep a eye on the memory usage ("<- v") and regularly save your work. You have been warned!

Have fun!

Nice job! I'm sure this will be a popular tool on the upcoming http://www.lcp.c64.org party!

I am so jealous we don't have anything like this in Australia

Reading there homepage sound like a real hooot

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Ha! I notice this ROM only now, and TAR v2 is *so* close to be released. Maybe there'll be a TAR v2.1

Could you tell us a bit about your experiences with the buffer sizes. How long sources do you plan to work with and what buffers run out first. I've done 2000+ lines of code with the unmodded version. This is where TASS starts to become slow and it's a good idea to split the sources anyway... My experience is that typically you couldn't go much further with an ordinary TASS. I think my largest source in plain TASS has been something like 3000 lines (which was slightly too big for unmodded TAR) and the theoretical maximum for TASS is 4096 lines. But of course more lines is always better. On the other hand with "modded memlayout" there's the drawback of breaking compatibility with older sources...

I tested the ROM and loaded some bigger source and it seemed to handle it just fine and left plenty of space. Nice! Of course I had to ->w and ->e it so I could load it to the new ROM so I started out with a "clean" source.

That sounds really promising. Can you give us some clues about the features you planned for that upcoming version?


I've made similar experiences with sources larger than 2000 lines. The optimal buffer size seems to depend a lot on the personal coding style. For example, since I tend to be quite talkative in my sources and use a lot of comments, I couldn't load some of my old sources which only had about 1800 lines.

For me, the following settings turned out to work well:

Label buffer size: $0200
Lines: $0c00
Names: $0ea0
Source: $44eb

By setting the corresponding labels in the defs.asm file (after patching the original sources), everyone can roll his/her own TAR with custom buffer sizes. The <-v command helps to keep track of the buffer usage while coding.