Extracted Merlin Assembler Sources
I was curious about what assemblers historically existed for the Apple //. I found this webpage which linked to a file named VALIDATE.PO.
I guessed that it was
a ProDOS formatted disk,
so headed over
to
this online Apple // emulator,
put a copy of ProDOS_2_4_2.dsk that I found
in
this archive in
Disk Drive 1, put VALIDATE.PO in Disk Drive 2, selected
BASIC.SYSTEM and typed CAT,D2 (meaning: "list file catalog, drive
2") and saw a bunch of .S files. Only later did I realize that I
didn't actually have to go into the BASIC prompt, and could have just
hit the 6 key to toggle over to Slot 6 Disk 2, instead of the
default Slot 6, Disk 1.
The next task was to try to actually extract the files. I
tried dskalyzer to but
couldn't quite succeed at using it after go build. I did
subsequently succeed at
using Apple Commander, and
wrote a little perl script to extract all of the files since I
couldn't find documentation for bulk extraction.
The extracted files are in the directory validate. Looking at the
instructions in READMEFIRST, I seem to need to be running an emulator
such as AppleWin that supports hard drives, in order to actually run
MERLIN.SYSTEM. If I try to do so from the javascript emulator
implementation, I get an error message "Unsupported Configuration".