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Fantasm 6 &
LIDE 3
HIGH SPEED
POWERPC & 68K
MACRO ASSEMBLER FOR MACINTOSH
31 March 2004 - A
warning about Fantasm and LIDE
The
products on this page are no
longer maintained by Lightsoft.
Our hope
is that even an old frozen
product
may be useful to someone. Obviously this could reflect badly on
Lightsoft - and is probably part of the reason why other companies end
of life. However we know that people still are interested
in our older products and have therefore made the decision to continue
to
make the last
versions accessible for free.
The
product information is also out
of
date and therefore should be considered "Historical Information".
Other pages on the Lightsoft Tools part of the web-site similarly
contains out of date
information.
Fantasm (including LIDE and Anvil)
Fantasm
development has been
frozen for quite a while and has not been updated to work
with later Mac operating systems. This means that you may have varying
success with the binaries of LIDE and Fantasm; please see the Tools News and
Support Pages for more information.
In the middle of 2003 we also decided to offer the source code - see
below for details.
Feedback of any sort is most welcome. The contact address is support@lightsoft.co.uk
03 July 2003 -
LIDE 3 (Inc
Fantasm 6) now Open Source.
We have made available the source
code to LIDE
3 under the GNU Public License (GPL). Please see the file COPYING in
the
release archive for full details.
This release includes projects for
Anvil, Fantasm,
Build, Linkers and other miscellaneous tools. You will need the last
release
of LIDE to build any of the projects (LIDE is built with itself).
A new forum has been set up where you can discuss any
aspect
of LIDE development, we'll try to answer any questions you may have as
we
get the time. You can download the complete project here
(6 MB Stuffit archive), and here
(.tar.gz version)
(Update 5 July 2003 - The archive now contains LXT)
17 Nov 2002 -
LIDE 3 (Inc
Fantasm 6) now available at no charge.
We have decided to stop charging for
Fantasm/LIDE
3. You can download the package here.
Lightsoft's Integrated Development
Environment
3 contains all of Fantasm 6 along with additions for C programming in
conjunction
with Apple's MrC C and C++ compiler.
Fantasm is a Macintosh assembly language development
environment
capable of translating both 680x0 and PowerPC assembly language. Our
design
ethos is simplicity with power and hence Fantasm's main aims are to
make
Macintosh assembly language simple to write, to ensure the code
produced
is running its fastest and to provide the most powerful environment for
Macintosh assembly language programmers.
The 68K assembler features auto optimisation and handling of
slack syntax
- for example move.l #3,d0 will be translated to a moveq instruction.
add
#7,a0 is automatically translated into the correct "adda" instruction.
The PPC assembler accepts all known simplified instructions
along with
AltiVec and optional floating point instructions. It automatically
handles
nearly all aspects of TOC creation for you, thus simplifying your
source.
It will even examine your code with an emulated processor to spot
stalls
and dependencies. When calling an OS function in PPC, Fantasm will save
you at least two PPC instructions over compiled code, sometimes more,
which
add up if you call the OS frequently!
Fantasm provides a powerful macro processor allowing you to
write your
own instructions to simplify your code and to create complex data
structures
via looping and conditional constructs. The macro language features
parametrized
, nested macros, nested if/else/endif conditionals, repeat-until loops,
various in-built variables, 26 string variables, string handling and
break
commands.
Both 68K and PPC assemblers share the same directive set.
These directives
range from simple data definition and alignment directives (auto or
manual),
through to more complex commands, such as directives used to create
floating
point sin tables (PPC) or switch the order of command searching
allowing
native assembler instructions to be replaced for cross translation
purposes.
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