65c816 - WLA Question

[Mikey88]

Hello RHDN!
I am new to 65c816 ASM and I am having trouble understanding this bit of code.

.MACRO LoadPalette
    lda #\2
    sta $2121       ; Start at START color
    lda #:\1        ; Using : before the parameter gets its bank.
    ldx #\1         ; Not using : gets the offset address.
    ldy #(\3 * 2)   ; 2 bytes for every color
    jsr DMAPalette
.ENDM

It is not so much the code I am having trouble with, I understand it is a Macro to load the palette data with a DMA transfer. I do not understand what is being stored to A, X, and Y, with these #\ - #\:  prefixes. I know # stands for an immediate value, but have never come across the \ . \: part. I see the comments say #:\1 gets the bank and #\1 gets the offset I am just unclear on what 1 is.

Thank,
Mikey

[Revenant]

\1, \2, and \3 are the macro's parameters. From the example, \1 is the 24-bit address to load from, \2 is the palette index to write to, and \3 is the number of palette entries to load. So, for example, if you had an array of 16 colors at the address $018000 and you wanted to use those as the first 16 palette entries, you would invoke the macro like this:

Code Select Expand

LoadPalette $018000, 0, 16 ; load palette entries 0-15 from $018000

which would expand to:

Code Select Expand

lda #0
sta $2121
lda #$01
ldx #$8000
ldy #32         ; 2 bytes per color
jsr DMAPalette

Hope that makes sense.

[Mikey88]

Thank you! Excellent explaination I understand now, I had searched forever trying to figure this out. Much appericiated.

[furrykef]

WLA is a heap of garbage and should not be used. I learned this the hard way, and had progress on a hack grind to a halt because of a bizarre bug in the assembler that I could not (and did not want to) figure out how to work around. Even before then, I found numerous other bugs. It crashes if you .include a blank file, for instance.

I've since started coding my own assembler, but you'll probably want to find another existing assembler (xkas 0.06 and forks of it are popular) instead of waiting for me to get around to finishing mine.

[Mikey88]

WLA is a heap of garbage and should not be used. I learned this the hard way, and had progress on a hack grind to a halt because of a bizarre bug in the assembler that I could not (and did not want to) figure out how to work around. Even before then, I found numerous other bugs. It crashes if you .include a blank file, for instance.

I've since started coding my own assembler, but you'll probably want to find another existing assembler (xkas 0.06 and forks of it are popular) instead of waiting for me to get around to finishing mine.

Thanks for the suggestion. I was reading through tutorials and the author was using WLA so everything I have learned and have on my computer is with WLA, and I am starting to get kind of comfortable with it, so I'm sticking with it for now but once I start to get the hang of things more I will take a look at xkas.

[LostTemplar]

xkas

These days I like bass more.

[Mikey88]

These days I like bass more.

I have never heard of that one until now. Just did a quick search on it, not a lot of documentation. One of the reasons I like WLA a lot is that massive readme (although it did not help with my question in the first post).