Denial

I'm not complaining at all. It's just a pretty silly thing to say. Especially about cc65 - it's neither "bloated" nor is it excessively commented. Quite the contrary is true - It's actually lacking a lot in that area.

IMHO comments should be used exclusively if the life of a developer depends on them but at least never tell what the code is already screaming about.

Hopefully you never write any software that someone else has to work with

the Small-C type compilers often seem to convert byte-arithmetic to 16 bits (via virtual ZP registers) for work, converting back to BYTE at the end - which is very inefficient. One reason for that are the integer promotion rules of C though. I'd expect most c-compilers doing this actually - just th...

You could just port the atari version (which later became cc65)

Yeah good luck What makes cc65 strong is the library and its ecosystem anyway, and if you rely on the optimizer of a 8bit compiler, you are doing it wrong

cc65 cant really do more than it does now (peephole optimizations) - it has to be rewritten to use an IR first - acqn has been working on it iirc, check his repos

In general, with user-written code, an assembler will not have a good idea about these conditions. It amounts to execute arbitrary code already in the assembler which, IMO, is not its job. Peephole optimization is well possible in an assembler. Actually Daniel Dallmann (Lunix) wrote such optimizer ...

Couldn't you make it generate the reset signal as well (would require a patch cable of ofcourse)?

I would love if someone made a small assembler like ASM502 for the ARM, targeting the pi, android, Arduino, blue pill etc, so you didn't have to run an SDK full of bugs taking a gigabyte or more.. Just build GAS for ARM? For all those modern CPUs it really doesn't make a lot of sense to make a cust...

I'd rather use some simple RLE packer for the first block though (and perhaps tscrunch for the final step)

I forgot the most valuable advice for this kind of question: use whatever the people you can ask use. It doesn't really really matter if you use dasm or 64tass or acme or any other of the popular ones (their feature set is very similar) - but it helps a lot if you can throw some quick questions at s...

I recommend ACME as a simple straightforward assembler. While CA65 is really great, its mostly aimed at experienced users and huge projects. ACME or 64tass are more like traditional assemblers, and probably easier to get started with.

I'd just do what pretty much became the standard in recent days for (larger) C64 games too: use a cartridge. That eliminates all concerns with memory.

The bitmap shouldnt be a problem - you can do that with a charset matrix.

With fully expanded VIC20, porting Elite sounds quite doable to me - still a lot of work, obviously

Use TapEX -> https://csdb.dk/release/?id=237663

load the tap, select "extract prg" from the menu, and it creates a directory with all files. For vic20 tapes you will probably have a pretty good success rate