Is anybody using !Cross32 ?

In 1991, I bought a copy of !Cross32 from Baildon Electronics. This is a RISC OS version of an existing well-established cross-assembler from another platform. It was originally a command-line program but Dave Prossor wrote a desktop front end allowing an assembler source file to be dragged to the icon bar icon and then the object and listing files would be created in the same directory.
I used this intensively at the time to develop the code for a project and now I need to revisit some of that code. I have got the assembler working OK but I have spent all day today trying to configure it the same way as I had it all those years ago.
To give an example, say the source code file was “ABC”, I had it configured such that the listing file came out as “ABC_L” and the hex file came out as “ABC_H” ie. using the source filename as the prefix for the filenames of the generated files. This is definitely what I achieved all those years ago as I have the evidence still on a backup hard disc but I’m dammed if I can achieve the same effect today. The desktop conversion has options via the icon bar menu for both listing filenames and hex file filenames, but no matter what I try, these can only be made to be same no matter what filename source file is being assembled. I think that I must be one of only a handful of people doing cross assembling on RISC OS today but I had a great deal of success with that program all those years ago and there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to continue with that as my requirements have hardly changed.
So, any help with suggestions for RISC OS command line syntax would be a great help. I need to extract the leafname and add a suffix but nothing I have tried today works.
The version of Cross32 is 2.2a which did get upgraded twice from my original copy.
Also, I can find nothing in the minimal supplied documentation about this topic.
With thanks, Kim.

Try running the cross-assembler program with no input/parameters, or something like -h as the parameter. Maybe there will be an option in there that might help?

If you can’t find a way to trigger built-in functionality, it can probably be forced on the program through the use of a devious code variable.

Is the front end compiled or is it written in BASIC? If the latter, one of us might be able to help you; but trying to decompile an app is very difficult.

If you’re repeatedly assembling the same file, you might well be able to invoke the assembler from an Obey or TaskObey file with the command line that you need.

Baildon Electronics was Dave Hitchens and Dave Prosser IIRC. Dave Hitchens is still active in the Stardot forums, maybe try to ask there?

Perhaps this stardot thread is the place to ask. :-)

Perhaps this stardot thread is the place to ask.

Textile beat your attempt, but hovering over the link gives you something you can work with to give a working link

With thanks to everyone who has responded so far. What is so frustrating is that the syntax must have been available to me before so why cannot I find it now?
What I have done is to dig out the two previous versions which is what I probably used on the A5000 in the early nineties. I think that these first two versions were only ever used on RISC OS 3.1 as they fail on a RISC PC with 4.02. Perhaps there was an extra module in 3.1 as the error I get with the second version is "SWI &DC04 not known. I have searched all available documentation and www but cannot establish which module hosted this SWI. This may be a clue to my problem and so any help in identifying the source of this SWI,maybe from RISC OS 3, would be most welcome.
Thanks again in advance. Kim.

I think that these first two versions were only ever used on RISC OS 3.1 as they fail on a RISC PC with 4.02. Perhaps there was an extra module in 3.1 as the error I get with the second version is "SWI &DC04 not known.

That’s much too low a number to be a extension module, since it’s in the Operating System SWI range but they’ve only got as high as &280.

It could be self modifying code failing, if your Risc PC is a StrongARM. Try

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