xa assembler: 16 bit immediate operand

Question

I'm trying to use xa to assemble some 65816 assembly, but it complains about "overflow errors" when it encounters 16 bit immediate operands, such as

bit #$100

This does not happen for arguments that fit in 1 byte, so it's clearly assuming an 8 bit accumulator rather than a 16 bit one. How can I indicate that the accumulator should be 16 bit? I am using the -w switch to enable 65816 opcodes, but that does not help. In wla-dx one can suffix the opcode with .w to explicitly tell it to use the 16 bit version of the opcode, but xa doesn't understand that.

Answer 1

A more thorough read of the xa man page revealed these pseudo-ops:

.as: Makes A register  8 bit
.al: Makes A register 16 bit
.xs: Makes XY registers  8 bit
.xl: Makes XY registers 16 bit

So I solved the problem by inserting .al : .xl at the beginning of the file.