Z80
Editor
Assembler
Package
Was produced by Paul Chapman and Geoffrey Roughton of Sigma Software in the early days of the Nascom-1. It incorporated an assembler using standard Z80 mnemonics and a screen editor - all within 2.7k of memory! This was a major "shoehorn" exercise! The price was 32UKP for a cassette and manual, which was quite a lot of money at the time (1978?).
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Initially it ran only under the NASBUG monitors, but a considerably improved version (ZEAP 2.0) was made available for Nas-Sys (1979/80). The whole editor-assembler packeage fitted into such a small memory space by utilising routines within the monitor program. As the NASBUG and Nas-Sys families of monitors varied in the way these routines were called, two versions were required. The cassette tape version would run on machines with as little as 8kB of RAM. |
| ZEAP was supplied on cassette tape or EPROMs complete with a manual, reference card and software registration form as a "Program Pack" (shown right) by Lucas Nascom. Note that this was actually ZEAP 2 but is labelled simply as "ZEAP". The packaging was a polythene bag with a cardboard header stapled onto it. Later, when the Nas-Dos disk system was released by Lucas Logic, another version of ZEAP was required because Nas-Dos also used the D000h-DFFFh address space! Other assemblers appeared later but ZEAP remained a favourite with many users in spite of its cost. |
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