Sharptool

What is sharptool ?

At the beginning, sharptool was 'only' an offline disassembler for Sharp pocket computers. Soon, I've added CPU instruction emulation and finally Sharptool was able to emulate a full PC-1350 .

Sharptool is coming with companions : assembler, binary files manipulators, ...

Sharptool's status

Sharptool is (and surely will stay) in BETA stage. Especially :

• I did had and still have very few time for it so I mainly focused on emulation and riding out any fancy things.
• Lot of work remains in order to make it really portable. For the moment, it focus on my own hardware : Unix (Linux/Solaris/HP-UX), using a QWERTY keyboard.
• poor documentation : these little pages plus embedded help.
• the big miss is currently CPU timing. CPU's cycles are not took in account. As a consequence, emulated is terribly fast making some game unplayable.

In the other hand :

• CPU emulation is very accurate : the only missing instructions are tape related ones (CUP and CDN)
• Thanks to C++ objects programming, any ESH powered pocket can be easily implemented ... After PC-1350, PC-2500 was an obvious target (as very close to PC-1350) but I'll probably also work on PC-1401/02 one day.
• As mainly developed on slow machines, this code is quite well optimised.
• As the real hardware, emulated pocket can act as international version or as an Japanese one.

Obviously, any help welcome to improve it.

Compilation

sharptool needs :

• any POSIX machine
  (an Amiga version is planned ... but when ? )
• any recent C++ compiler : the compilation was only tested with GCC but no GNUish has been used,
• X window
• Motif or clone of it (sharptool is known to run with Lesstif).

It was programed and tested on

• SUN Ultra 5 under Solaris 8 & Ultra 60 under Solaris 10
• HP 715 and 712 under HP-UX 10.20 workstation (also tested under HP-UX 11.0).
• Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.4 PCs (2010 update ).

To compile it, just do a make in the distribution root directory. g++ must be somewhere in your PATH.
NOTEZ BIEN : if the compilation fails at linkage stage:

1. Sharptool needs nanosleep() function so you may have to have to add -lrt in the Makefile inside sharptool directory. It's needed for Solaris and create an error under HP-UX, ... it's up to you to check if your OS need it.
2. On some systems (Linux, ...), X libraries aren't in the search path. I the compilation fails, have a look on ./sharptool/Makefile and customize the -L directive ...

asm

Originaly wrote for the Amiga (and still containing Amigaishes ), asm is an ESR_H assembler so suitable to generate binary for Sharp's pockets.
All messages are wrote in French, sorry, but are quite understandable.

Command line arguments

AsmEsr_H [-b] source target

• source : Assembler source code to compile
• target : generated files, binary or basic code
• -b : optional flag to generate basic code ... without it, a binary file is generated.

Labels

asm supports 2 kinds of label :

• {label} - define a local label that will be kept as private to this file
• [label] - define a global label that will be saved in target.lab file

Note : saved labels can be read in sharptool.

It is possible to add an offset to a label : example
   jp [mylabel]+3
will jump to 3 bytes after [mylabel]. Obviously, this offset can be negatif
   jp [mylabel]-3

Preprocessor

Preprocessor commands are instructions only meaningful to the assembler and, so, not generating any binary. Only 2 preprocessor commands are known :

• #deflab [label] address - define a label ; local labels are also supported
• #loadlab file - load a label file. Tip : Sharptool's label files are compatible.

CPU instructions

In addition to official instructions, asm recognizes

• org address - it must be the first instruction of a source file and define the initial memory address to generate.
• liab 16b_value - generate LIA/LIB pair to store the 16 bits argument in A & B registers.
• case/else pair that replace original CASE1/CASE2 ... so no need to compute ourself the number of values
• dc data - store comma separated data in memory. Example
     dc 'c', "blabla", [label], &ABCD, &EF
  will store
  • a c character
  • a blabla string
  • the adress of a label
  • &ABCD 16 bits binary, lower byte first (so that can be used by a MVBD to load 16 bits pointers)
  • &EF 8 bits binary

Bin2Bas

convert a binary dump to a BASIC lines.

Command line arguments

Bin2Bas [-n] [-sAAAA] [-lnum] < infile > outfile

• -n : Doesn't check checksum
• -sAAAA : normaly, data are poked in the adress set in the infile ; with this option, the start adresse should be modified
  Gaps between address in the source file are respected.
• -lnum : specify the first line of the basic program (10 default)

Dump2Bin

Convert raw binary file to a binary ...

Command line arguments

Dump2Bin AAAA < infile > outfile

CheckBin

Check if a binary file is correct ...

• Addresses must follows each other
• checksum must be ok

Command line arguments

CheckBin [-n] [-a] < infile

• -n : Doesn't check checksums
• -a : doesn't check addresses

Relog

Change addresses in a binary file

Command line arguments

Relog AAAA < infile > outfile