Motorola 6809 to 68000 Assembly Language Source Translator

In 1986, Motorola offered a tool to help programmers port their code from the 6809 to 68000 microprocessor. The tool, written in Pascal, was intended to do about 90% of the work of translation.

Included here are some sample files and instructions on how to run this tool, which is now mostly of historical interest.

I originally downloaded the code from http://www.retro.co.za/68000/XLATE09/

A number of modifications were made to the original files:

I was able to compile the tool using the Free Pascal compiler under Linux with the addition of one line: "Uses Crt;". I made a few other changes to remove warnings about unused variables.

The data files used by the program needed to be renamed to lower case as Linux is case sensitive. I renamed all the files to all lower case.

I removed some Control-Z characters from some of the files. This character indicated the end of file back in the days of MS-DOS, but nowadays can cause some problems.

Included here is the following:

A 6809 test file which can be converted to 68000 code using the tool.

The original trans09.com executable will run under Linux the dosbox MS-DOS emulator on Linux. I was also able to run it under Windows 10, but I got a number of errors that I had to ignore.

The Pascal source can be compiled to generate a Linux executable which will run. The data files must be in the same same directory where the tool is run.

The supplied make file will build the tool under Linux and run the demo under dosbox and under Linux.

Under Ubuntu Linux, dosbox is available in the package "dosbox" and the Free Pascal compiler in the package "fp-compiler".

To actually use this tool you may need to modify it and/or the data files to work with your particular 68000 cross-assembler. For example, the VASM assembler I use does not like the stub routine names starting with two dots like "..RTS" but will accept them with only one dot (e.g. ".RTS").

Description of files:

README.md - This file.

Makefile - make file for building code and running examples.

xlate09.arc - The original download archive of files. Under Linux, the "arc" program can extract the files.

readme.txt - The original README file for the package.

manual.txt - The full manual for the tool.

trans09.com - An MS-DOS executable for the tool.

trans09.pas - Pascal source code for the tool.

codes.dbb - Table 1 data file used by the program.

codes2.dbb - Table 2 data file used by the program.

stubxref.dbb - Stub XREF source file used by the program.

example.09 - Example 6809 source code.

stub09.txt - Source code for stubs that can be referenced in the generated code (see the manual).

testfile.asc - A larger 6809 test file that can be used to test the tool.

Generated files:

trans09 - The Linux executable (compiled using Free Pascal).

example.68 - Converted output of the tool when run with example.09 as input.

testfile.out - Converted output of the tool when run with testfile.asc as input.

error.txt - Error output from the trans09 program.