development tools • 6502 assembler choices

I've been going through my 6502 projects with the intention of making them easier for other people to build with assemblers other people use. A lot of my code has been written with the BBC BASIC assembler to take advantage of being able to use BASIC features, but a lot of my code doesn't need that, and can be assembled with a plain assembler.

Some of the code has if/else/endif blocks so needs that functionality. Some needs something like a command-line -DEFINE option, but that can often be avoided by having a "launch" file that then includes the main code.

I've got several assemblers:
as65
vasm65
cc65
beebasm

but it's a fight trying to get code into a state where it is minimally simple to convert to different assembler syntax. byte vs db vs .byte, if vs .if, equ vs =, $hex &hex 0xhex, -ignorecase options don't, everything must be lower case (don't mind everything upper case, that's my habit), sometimes always label: sometimes always label, sometimes label: or label depending on context or the phase of the moon, argh!!!!

I've got some bits of code I've put together that manages to automate converting between some formats. What advice would people recommend for a most-common-case target?

Here are some samples:
https://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/6502/Code/ansi.src
https://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/6502/Code/input.asm
https://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/6502/Code/Ha ... s2kbd1.asm
https://mdfs.net/Software/Tube/6502/Mini65.asm
https://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/ProgTips/GST ... rans65.asm

Statistics: Posted by jgharston — Sat Oct 04, 2025 12:29 am

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