Old Design Design games sources and stuff... (Last update - 02:15:06 11/10/2024)

NOTE: The available Z80 cross assemblers these days are awful, primitive, limited and often buggy, so I've released a free version of Zeus for the PC. It's nearly a decade old now and has become quite a sophisticated tool, with IDE and emulation. It runs well under emulation in other OS's, so you've no excuse for using a command-line assembler out of the dark ages... unless you like struggling, of course.

N-N-NOTE: Okay, it's now over a decade since I wrote that last paragraph, and the situation as far as available Z80 cross assemblers goes has improved somewhat - something, and I really can't think what, has caused a few people to greatly improve their assemblers, almost invariably in ways that mimic (poorly as a rule) aspects of Zeus, but somehow have absolutely nothing to do with Zeus, and it's only entirely coincidentally they were added after they'd been introduced to the public releases of Zeus... go figure.

Well, I suppose they at least had the sense to steal from the best, or from others who had even if they didn't realise it.

It has also been amusing to hear from people in the games industry telling tales about various in-house assemblers they used back in the 80s that were rip-offs of Zeus, and by rip-off I mean just changing the name and (often) altering the output routine to direct the output through some custom ParaSys-like interface. Some of which we were aware of, others we weren't, and none of which were actually endorsed.

As always kudos to those developers who credit their sources - most do - and perdition to those who don't... sadly, and laughably, as I write this one of the open-sore assemblers that has been stealing ideas hand over fist from Zeus for years is now snidely denying it, with a sarcastic comment crediting me for inventing the DG/DH pseudo-ops only... how sad is that? Perhaps as sad as grumbling about sociopathic behavior in the retro-computing world... I should tell the plagiarising tossers to get a life, but they'd have to steal one from someone else ;)

It's a pity the only part of Zeus that's never ripped-off is the reliability, but in principle writing reliable code requires competence and thieves never work to acquire that; it can't be stolen.

Anyway, enough grumbling... if such a thing is possible... Zeus also includes a useful but profoundly unhelpful Z80 disassembler, one that can (with help) disassemble binary code to usable source code. Please see the documentation, and then shudder and avoid at all costs; Diana has hardly changed since the version I wrote in 1979 (using ZEAP, IIRC) and I leave it that way for historical interest. I got better.

I've added a section for contributions from third-parties, I'll organise this better at some point; they probably deserve a page of their own.