Turbo Assembler (C64)

The native C64 assembler that served maniacs-of-noise as its music editor: "The editor for both of us was easy: Turbo Assembler :)" — charles-deenen wrote the musicfile driver and SFX driver in it, and jeroen-tel, Marcel Donné and reyn-ouwehand composed "by typing hexadecimal numbers and labels into the driver's source code" (sources: s-charles-deenen-interviews, s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise).

Facts#

• Deenen's welcome kit for a new MoN composer was "a disk with Turbo Ass, his music driver, and some 4-bit samples" (source: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise).
• The Cybernoid "behind the notes" videos show exactly that: "the turbo assembler sourcecode of the player and the note/instrument tables" scrolling next to the tune; a forum member contrasts "typing them silently into Turbo Assembler then assembling" with rob-hubbard's way of poking notes into a monitor while the tune plays (source: s-cybernoid-behind-the-notes).
• The recovered Cybernoid II source keeps traces of that editing ("; ($1d in orig)", a commented-out step) and has since been converted to the cross-assembler ACME (source: s-realdmx-sid-players). Other composers used other assemblers — chris-huelsbeck Profi-Ass 64 and, for matt-gray's 2014 release, the cross-assembler 64tass (sid-player-routine).

• Deenen in 2010, asked for his tools: "Turbo Assembler, baby! Turbo Assembler... and that was it." (source: s-c64com-charles-deenen-interview). To C=Lehti in 1989 he described it as made "by a German cracker" and better, in his opinion, than every commercial assembler — while by then Tel also typed notes as numbers on a home PC with C64 cross-assembly software (source: s-c-lehti-maniacs-of-noise).

• Where it ran out: JCH wrote NewPlayer and his editor in Turbo Assembler, and composed his first tunes the same way MoN did — about six tunes typed as hex into the assembler listing of laxity's player, Laxity himself "composing by typing in hexadecimal numbers into a monitor". By December 1990 the assembler's own memory footprint was the bottleneck for the growing editor, so version 3 was coded on EASS, Henning Andersen's hardware cross-assembler: source edited on an Amiga 500, compiled and dumped straight into C64 RAM. Turbo Assembler is a native tool, and a big project eventually collides with the 64 K it shares (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).

Related#

musicfile · maniacs-of-noise · sid-player-routine · cybernoid · cybernoid-ii · jch-editor · chordian

Sources#

s-charles-deenen-interviews · s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise · s-cybernoid-behind-the-notes · s-realdmx-sid-players · s-c64com-charles-deenen-interview · s-c-lehti-maniacs-of-noise · s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles