Linkstor80 & Libstor80

A couple of months ago Konamiman launched Nestor80, a new Z80 cross-assembler compatible with MACRO-80. Although Nestor80 worked fine as a standalone tool for generating absolute binary files, when using it to generate relocatable files it was still necessary to use the old LINK-80 and LIB-80 tools for the linking process.

But that's no longer the case! The circle is now closed with the release of Linkstor80, the linking loader that replaces LINK-80; and Libstor80, the library manager that replaces LIB-80.

These new tools aren't just simple replacements for the old ones: additionally, a new extended relocatable file format is defined that is backwards compatible with the old format generated by MACRO-80 and processed by LINK-80, that gets rid of the annoying limitation of six characters for symbol names; which, additionally, are now stored using UTF-8 encoding, not just plain ASCII.

A new version of Nestor80 itself is available as well, this new version generates relocatable files that conform to the new extended format. A --link-80-compatibility command line argument is provided, though, to generate relocatable files conforming to the old LINK-80 format if needed.

But that's not all folks! The main motivation for starting the Nestor80 project was the ability to build Nextor without having to depend on old tools and without having to limit symbols to not very readable 6 character strings. So additionally to the release of Linkstor80 and Libstor80, the entire build process for Nextor has been migrated to Nestor80: the kernel, all the drivers, NEXTOR.SYS and the command line tools, everything is now assembled using Nestor80 and linked using Linkstor80 and Libstor80. No new version of Nextor is released this time, though.

As a bonus, the source code for the MegaFlashROM SCC+ SD Nextor driver is now included as part of the Nextor repository, all for the same price.

Relevant link: Nestor80 1.1
Relevant link: Linkstor80 1.0
Relevant link: Linbstor80 1.0
Relevant link: Nextor build process migration pull request

Comentários (8)

Por DarkSchneider

Paladin (1022)

20-03-2023, 19:45

Excellent system software and tools as always.

Por Pencioner

Scribe (1566)

20-03-2023, 20:04

Hey, that's a charm, great job Nestor!

Por foody

Champion (469)

21-03-2023, 02:42

I still don't understand what this is, exactly? Does that mean you can have long filename at last?

Por konamiman

Paragon (1198)

21-03-2023, 08:42

foody wrote:

I still don't understand what this is, exactly? Does that mean you can have long filename at last?

Nestor80 is used to build Nextor, but it has nothing to do with Nextor itself.

What this new release means is that you'll be able to produce relocatable files ("pre-assembled" files with a special format in which all the program memory addresses are relative) with unlimited length for public symbols (symbols that are defined in one program and referenced in a different one).

Por S0urceror

Master (210)

21-03-2023, 10:06

I think this is wonderful news. No need to run CP/M instances to run the stone-age Microsoft assembler and linker.

This probably also speeds up the build process isn’t it? On my M1 Mac the whole build always took quite some time. I’ll try and report back how it goes.

Thanks Nestor!

Por The_Engineer

Master (192)