Reputation: 3366

What are your favourite ZX Spectrum development tools?

What are your favourite assemblers, compilers, environments, interpreters for the good old ZX Spectrum?

Upvotes: 27

Answers (14)

Martin

Reputation: 2434

Zeus assembler, was the best.

I'd add a couple of the Spectrum books in there if I could remember the names, still have them at home. One was The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly by Ian Logan and Frank O'Hara (ISBN 0 86161 116 0), which was commented and described as if it was the source, a fantastic piece of reverse engineering, including a suggested bug fix for the known ROM bugs. If only flash memory had been around in those days. I also memorised a tiny book called the Z80 Workshop Manual which was a great summary of the processor.

Upvotes: 4

Andrew Rollings

Reputation: 14571

For contemporary development, TommyGun is an excellent choice.

It has a built in assembler, map editor, graphics editor and other goodies. It also supports multiple 8-bit platforms.

It works well in conjunction with the excellent ZX Spin emulator for debugging.

Upvotes: 2

liftarn

Reputation: 445

I'm using Z88DK, but I think also SDCC may be of interest.

Upvotes: 0

polomint

Reputation: 37

BASin, TommyGun, ConTEXT and the Pasmo cross-compiler. Works great with the ZXSpin emulator too,,

Upvotes: 2

Ray Hayes

Reputation: 15015

I used to type in hex-tables from a magazine and then a a short basic application to unpack the data into assembly code. I couldn't make heads nor tails of it for ages until I discovered I wasn't actually coding at all!

I then moved onto Z80 assembly on a College owned CP/M mini computer system. Programming the Speccy was never the same after that and I never went back!

Upvotes: 2

SmacL

Reputation: 22932

Well outside of GEN80, HiSoft Pascal and Hisoft C were pretty impressive. Proper high level languages, way cool. Before I learnt Z80, and was frustrated by the speed of BASIC, I also loved MCODER, though more on the ZX81 than ZX Spectrum.

Upvotes: 0

Flavius Suciu

Reputation: 179

Hisoft Gens and Mons assembler and disassembler for programming/debugging.

The Artist / The Art Studio for graphics:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0007918

The Music Box for sound:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0008481

Upvotes: 5

Softhouse

Reputation:

Assembler Prometheus from Proxima Software.

Upvotes: 1

DamienG

Reputation: 6665

There are some good PC-based packages too. For Sinclair BASIC based development the excellent BASin package for Windows gives you a good syntax highlighter, runtime virtual machine, built-in editors for fonts and UDG's etc.

Upvotes: 1

yuracat

Reputation:

ZX-Asm v3.1 + patched HiSoft-C v1.1 / figFORTH / BetaBasic 3.0

Upvotes: 1

djpowell

Reputation: 377

I always used to use Roybot Assembler - which had you enter your program using the BASIC editor and REM statements. It comes with a decent debugger/disassembler that lets you single-step machine code too.

The Hisoft Gens and Mons assembler and disassembler (aka Devpak) are probably fairly popular.

For high-level compiling, the Mira Modula-2 compiler is very good.

Upvotes: 5

Linulin

Reputation: 4150

ZX ASM 3.0

It had the best user interface and good feature set compared to other assemblers at the end of the twentieth century.

Upvotes: 3

akauppi

Reputation: 18066

Devpac (a blue cassette) comes to my mind, even after all these years.

Sure, it was #1. I don't miss the cassette loadings, though. Nice question!!! :D

http://www.clive.nl/detail/22916/

I think I had v.3. It sure looked much more home-made than the this pic. But it worked and didn't have a single bug. Beat that, current software!!!

Upvotes: 2

tovare

Reputation: 4087

Just programming in BASIC, the commands are right there on those rubbery keys. Now if only PC's could have key-legends with while, case, switch etc. on them :-)

Upvotes: 3

What are your favourite ZX Spectrum development tools?

Answers (14)

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