LWTOOLS

About LWTOOLS

LWTOOLS is a set of cross-development tools for the Motorola 6809 and Hitachi 6309 microprocessors. It supports assembling to raw binaries, CoCo LOADM binaries, and a proprietary object file format for later linking. It also supports macros and file inclusion among other things.

LWTOOLS was born in 2006 when William Astle decided that none of the crossassemblers available at the time supported all the features he wanted to use. After over two years of intermittent development, and three separate releases of LWASM and one separate release of LWLINK, LWTOOLS had it's initial release on January 29, 2009.

You can read the manual for LWTOOLS version 4.0 online as a single HTML page, multiple HTML pages, or as a PDF.

If anyone wishes to support further development of LWTOOLS, I accept bitcoin donations at the following address: 1EcdzmbwuqY4ydBtmyzP58wJywvLUqkGzE. I also accept USD and CAD by post. Contact me for details. If you have a pet feature you want added to the tools, you might be able to motivate me to implement it for a sufficient bribe.

Downloads

The following released versions are available. Please do not report bugs in older releases unless they are present in the latest release. Old releases are provided for archaeological purposes only.

• LWTOOLS 4.5. This version comes with a raft of minor fixes including a major speedup in resolving forward references which will be most noticeable on large source files. Download the source code.
• LWTOOLS 4.4. This version fixes a critical code generation bug with 16 bit relative branch instructions which was introduced in version 4.3. Download the source code.
• LWTOOLS 4.3. *** Don't use this release--See 4.4 above*** This release fixes several bugs, notably related to building OS9 modules. It also contains a new pragma, autobranchlength, which allows the assembler to decide whether to use a long or short branch as needed for any branch instruction. It also comes with a --define command line switch to allow specifying symbol values on the command line. I do not have a properly functional build environment for Windows so no binaries at this time. If anyone is willing to contribute such, let me know. Download the source code.
• LWTOOLS 4.2. This version fixes a number of memory leaks, an incorrect malloc() size, problems with *pragma and ifdef, and adds a "nolist" pramga to suppress portions of the listing when using --list. It also corrects errors handling &-prefixed decimal constants and %-prefixed binary constants. This version may or may not compile and work properly under Windows. I am informed that some of the fixes have helped. I do not have a properly functional build environment for Windows so no binaries at this time. If anyone is willing to contribute such, let me know. Download the source code.
• LWTOOLS 4.1. This version fixes a couple of code generation errors, one of which affects a relatively uncommon indexed mode. It also has a few functional regressions against the 3.x versions fixed so it should now work as a backend for gcc6809. See the extras/ folder for more information. Download the source code. Sorry, no Windows binaries at this time. I don't have Windows so I can't test Windows builds and given the problems that have occurred with them in the past, I feel it would be a disservice to provide binaries that may or may not work. If anyone with a function Windows build environment (32 or 64 bit) is willing to compile, I'll post the resulting binaries here.
• LWTOOLS 4.0. A new version of lwtools is out, now freshly freed from autotools hell. This is the first release after a major reorganization and retooling of the code to remove dependence on autotools for portability. As such, there may be bugs. It is, however, capable of assembling Color Basic and Extended Color Basic correctly. Download the source code or the win32/win64 binaries. Note that there have been reports of problems with the windows builds on some systems, notably Windows 7. If someone is willing to take on the task of maintaining a Windows port of lwtools, please contact me.
  Aaron Wolfe has kindly provided these win64 binaries which may work better than the ones in the windows binaries package above.
• Older release notices are archived here.

The source code is also available from the project's mercurial repository which can be found at http://lwtools.projects.l-w.ca/hg/.

Note that the project originally used subversion. However, on March 18, 2010, it was switched over to mercurial.

Note also that as of January 19, 2011, the old repository was decommissioned in favour of a new, clean repository. The old repository is available at http://lwtools.projects.l-w.ca/hg-old/ in case anyone wishes to inspect it.

Back to CoCo 3 Stuff.