Just a dumb fundamental question: Is there documentation for using this ARM cross-assember? I'm new to ARM, but very familiar with assembly on a dozen other architectures. Thx.

Check this out: http://arm.flatassembler.net/ReadMe.txt

E: of course combined with the regular FASM documentation

While this is very helpful, and has been captured into my document base, I also need a full set of assembler directives, pseudo-ops, macro creation syntax, declaring symbols public and extern, command-line options, and all that. Is there a separate document that covers all this?

Doesn't the FASM Programming Manual cover all your concerns?

It would be useful to read the fasm (not the fasmarm) documentation to get the basic idea how fasmarm is installed and how to run it, but of course the x86 instruction section can be skipped. Then you read the ARM ARM [sic] from arm.com to understand the ARM CPU and instruction set. Then you read the fasmarm documentation to see the way that it differs from fasm and after that you should be set to go.

Thx. I've collected enough books and PDFs on the ARM itself to feel comfortable with it (and I like what I see). It's just a matter of getting an assembler and a simulator to gain confidence that I'm understanding things correctly. We're still a few months off from selecting hardware, but I can at least get up to speed on the non-I/O part of the project. I will do as you suggest, then.