Mmm. This topis is about what coding tools you requiere, not about what coding tools you are currently using.

I'd say that I'd like to have WAV support in BlueMSX. For me, a good emulator is the BEST coding tool. openMSX does support WAV and it works pretty well, I should say, but the debugger is not as handy as BlueMSX's one is.

About coding tools, I'd like to have a central repository of assembler routines and/or snippets for different tasks. Something more dynamic than MAP, perhaps a Wiki.

pitpan, did you try the GUI debugger for openMSX, which is still unreleased, but already usable?

For now i'll like TniAsm but i wish it has a nice GUI (for win32) and a build-in hex editor.
What would be really nice is a very good C editor/compiler for win32 for cross-development that can compile fast code for our beloved MSX machine.

@shaiwa:

Do you realize that an assembler doesn't need a GUI? It should just assemble. You do need a good editor and you also seem to need a good hex editor. I think you can find plenty of free programs to fulfill your needs with that.

Also, for C there are loads of good editors. A compiler is the interesting part, which was discussed before.

UltraEdit is very nice editor, contains all you need. You can even use regualor expresions so it can list labels for you. Too bad it's not free

@manual:
I know that, just want to get rid of the dos box also i've got lots of hex editor to chose from.
The problem is that there are no all-in-one proggies out there... hey we're talking windows here
About the compiler i agree, but if may wish i wish it all

@msd:
There are risky site's out there but if you want it for free ......... astalavista baby
(be sure quad check and double check you're system afterwards )

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A very good optimizing C compiler targeted for MSX would be nice. I'm not sure about z88dk, but it looks like it's a candidate. Optimizing is a key thing. Oh, and it should be free software, of course (We did some C development for MSX and testing it right away with an emulator is rather comfy!)

None of the C compilers can generate "good" z80 code, as in code that would look anything like what would be written by hand by a competent z80 assembler programmer. When going after execution speed (eg in the main loop of a game), the quality of libraries is most important -- they should be written in assembler and they should be "close to the surface" so that C is really only used to provide the glue for executing sequences of hand-assembled functions. At other times, when the execution time doesn't matter, everything can be in C and it doesn't really matter what the quality of C-generated code is (they're all similar, with some generating better code in certain circumstances and others in other circumstances), except perhaps compactness should be emphasized.

One thing that would be very popular is a global z80 code optimizer that could take as input assembler files and spit out something optimized; this would be able to go a lot further than any kind of optimizer built into the C compilers as they are constrained by the kind of code their code generators can emit. This would be quite a difficult project though.

Besides that, the code optimizer can't just mock around code; it has to respect ordering in terms of disabling/enabling interrupts and pushing/popping registers. Although in general I think many optimisations are doable, such as replacing "ld a,0" with "xor a". However, the latter changes flags. So euh... it's quite difficult I guess

shaiwa: you don't want all in one, you want perfect stand alone programs that can be glued together easily to create a perfect workflow

I think MSXPad or Chaos Assembler did something like this. Use very good commandline tools and glue them together. THe user won't notice it.

I'm currently quite happy with MSXpad, but I'm stuck with text until I can find a good guide/tutorial to the libraries included with it.

High-level stuff for SymbOS would be great as well.

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such as replacing "ld a,0" with "xor a". However, the latter changes flags. So euh... it's quite difficult I guess

I'd say that's not something to automate. A coder still must do *something*..

What might be more fun is to incorporate the things that are common in C64 demo's: draw images without any loops, just directly put the whole image-creation code (for each pixel!) in RAM and perform it.

Something like: (exqueeze me my lack of asm-skills )

LD A,15
LD (0000),A
LD A,15
LD (0001),A
LD A,12
LD (0002),A
LD A,3
LD (0003),A
LD A,3
LD (0004),A

etc.

Now, this may look like a silly way to fill a piece o' RAM (and I'm not sure this actually works, since our VRAM is not shared), but this is how those C64 geeks do their stuff! (Of couse, this code is then generated) They argue that this is faster than nesting one such an instruction into a loop and add code into the loop to change the write address.. at the cost of RAM.

So, I don't exactly know how, but perhaps these kinda odd tricks could be automated!

Disadvantage to this approach is that you'd need more memory for your code. But it may be handy sometimes, too

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UltraEdit is very nice editor, contains all you need. You can even use regualor expresions so it can list labels for you. Too bad it's not free

Then have a look at Crimson editor - almost the same feature set as UE but free!

NotePad++ does the trick too

gvim rules