Apple II cross-development 101

My initial task tonight was to set up an emulation environment for the II/IIGS and ensure that I could boot arbitrary disk images; ultimately that will be my Asteroids disk. My emulator of choice is MAME and for this exercise I downloaded the latest version, v0186.

Knowing next-to-nothing about Apple II DOS variants, I did some quick reading of some historical and high-level technical details and decided that it would be useful to be able to boot and work with both DOS (v3.3) and ProDOS 8 (v2.0.3 & v2.4.1) disks. It may interest some to know that only last year, ProDOS 8 received an (unofficial) update, the first since 1993!

Now that I was able to boot both DOS and ProDOS in Apple IIe & IIGS emulations under MAME, the next issue was getting Apple II executable files from the host OS (Win7) into the aforementioned .DSK files. Two options that revealed themselves with little effort on my part were CiderPress and MAME's own imgtool, although the latter only seems to support ProDOS disk images. Though I haven't actually performed an import just yet, I'm satisfied that this process will be straightforward enough.

The last - or rather first - step in the chain is producing the executable itself. Given past experience with retro development there's no question that I will be cross-assembling, and there's a handful of solutions in this regard. Initially I was keen to stick with AS6500, even if it meant writing my own utility to convert the binary output to an Apple II executable file (as I have done in the past for the TRS-80), or even extending ASLINK to do so as Boisy Pitre has done for the Coco, but after further deliberation and considering time constraints I've decided to at least start with AS65/LD65, the assembler and linker respectively from the now defunct CC65 package.

So that ties down the first iteration of my development environment.

Hopefully next session I can write a simple hello world program for the Apple II, assemble and link it with AS65 & LD65, copy it to a DOS 3.3 .DSK image file with CiderPress, and boot it under Apple IIe emulation on MAME.

Then I'll be half-way there, right?