AppleIIAsm-Collection/documentation/The New Merlin Users' Quick Start Guide/The New Users' Quick Guide to Merlin Pro 8 in DOS 3.3.md
nathanriggs 4554eaf2ae MASSIVE: Documentation and Disk 1: REQUIRED
- added cycle and byte count comments
- additionally added status flag clobbering comments
- wrote beginning of final documentation form in markdown for disk 1: REQUIRED
- consolidated macros and subroutines on disk 1
- created alias macros for 65C02, 8080, and Z80 architectures
- entirely rewrote and expanded documentation for disk 1
- rewrote disk 1 demo file to use fewer bytes by using comments instead of _PRN statements
- implemented a software architeture that will span across all libraries in the collection
- added .ASM extension to text sources to help with file attribution on contemporary systems
- slightly modified the naming convention for EXEC files
- fixed minor errors
2020-01-19 15:31:10 -05:00

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# The New Users' "Quick" Guide to DOS 3.3 Merlin Pro 8
---
Nathan Riggs
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## Table of Contents
Foreward
Introduction
1. But Why?
2. About this Text
3. Don't Abandon Bredon!
4. Main Audience Assumptions
5. System Requirements
6. Additional Reading
I. What's New?
1. Old is the New New
2. Emulators
3. Hardware Replacements
4. GitHub and Company
II. The Main Menu
1.
III. The Source Editor
IV. Assembly Space
V. Syntax, Labels and Variables
VI. Macros
VII. Pseudo-Opcodes
VIII.
---
## Foreword
This guide is for those of you crazy folk out there who, like myself, choose to use a nearly 40 year-old assembler instead of take advantage of the myriad "better" options available today, in 2020. There are many reasons you might choose to do this: like me, you might be in the middle of something like an archeological media dig, or perhaps reenactment, that allows you to better understand the woes and weariness of assembly programming when it was still a highly relevant language to use. You might be wanting to assemble a program on original hardware, for whatever reason, or you might just be a plain old masochist. This booklet is definitely for the former two, but if you're in it for some pleasurable pain, I'd say go straight to the original manual itself.
But that does bring up a good point: if an original manual exists, and is comprehensive (it is, by all means), then why does one need a new guide today, "quick" or otherwise?