Imagesource: https://github.com/0xC0DE6502/

With the Elite source code being available, a bigger bang was still missing when it came to tooling. And this also came in February with the debut of a fresh, new, still steaming assembler.

Programming in Assembly is either huge fun, or a real pain-on-the-dark-side-of-the-moon™ – depending on who you ask. Assembly especially for the 65XX family of processors can be real fun though, at least if you have the right assembler at hand, and especially if it supports macros and comes with a whole bunch of build-in features on top of that.

And if we take exactly this as the basic definition of fun, then the fun should have no end from now on. Why?

An unknown Acorn Electron fanboy going by the twitter handle @0xC0DE6502 has recently released a new macro assembler for the 65XX processor family. And this thing has it all. If you know BeebAsm, you'll feel right at home almost immediately. max65 not only borrowed inspiration, but many of the directives and build-in functions are virtually the same.

The documentation is excellent, and for those who like to make life difficult for themselves, this is not a good place to be. For everyone else - take a look, try it out, be happy.