Getting Started#

With the prerequisites behind you — how a television works, thinking in bits, and the memory-mapped interface — you’re ready to actually write a ROM. This short chapter is about the tools and the skeleton.

The toolchain is simply how you reach the hardware: DASM assembles your instructions into a ROM image, and Stella runs that image so you can watch the machine execute it, line by line. From there the chapter ends at the smallest ROM that produces a stable picture — the skeleton every later project is built on.

• Toolchain: DASM & Stella — installing the assembler and emulator and the build/run loop.
• Anatomy of a Minimal ROM — the include files, the reset vector, and the frame loop skeleton.

Everything in this book assembles with DASM and runs in Stella. The repository’s xmas/Makefile is the canonical build invocation; the rest of the book builds on that loop.