Nestor80

January 28th, 2023 was undoubtedly a historic day for the Barcelona MSX users meeting. But Nishi sama was not the only person holding a presentation at the event, there were more presenters and amongst them there was Konamiman, telling the story of the Nextor project.

The surprise came when in the middle of his talk Konamiman unveiled his latest development: Nestor80, a new Z80 cross-assembler. Although the motivation for creating Nestor80 was the desire to build Nextor without having to resort to CP/M emulation to run MACRO-80, Nestor80 is in fact a general-purpose assembler that can be used for any Z80 project.

This is a highlight of what Nestor80 offers to the Z80 developer willing to give it a try:

• Multiplatform. Runs on any device compatible with the .NET 6 runtime, this includes Windows (x86, x64, arm), Linux (x64, arm) and macOS (x64, arm).
• Almost fully compatible with MACRO-80 for Z80 code (Nestor80 doesn't assemble 8080 code). Existing Z80 source code that was designed for MACRO-80 can be assembled with Nestor80, requiring little or no changes in most cases (the existing incompatibilites are mostly for obscure or undocumented features).
• Can produce absolute and relocatable code. Most assemblers produce only absolute code, MACRO-80 produces only relocatable code.
• Modern string handling. The source code can be in any character encoding supported by .NET (defaults to UTF-8), and the encoding used to assemble text strings to sequences of bytes can be chosen individually for each string (e.g. IBM850 for Spanish text and SHIFT-JIS for Japanese text). Also escape sequences in strings (e.g. \r, \n, \x34) are supported.
• Programmatic API. .NET applications can reference the Nestor80 library file and use it to assemble Z80 code on their own, as an alternative to running the N80 executable from the command line.

So here's a new toy for you to play with if you like to mess with Z80 codez. Go and get it while supplies last!

Relevant link: Nestor80 repository
Relevant link: Nestor80 1.0 release