How to get an environment set up??

[BvdW]

Hello all,
Just recently I dug up an old Amiga 500 and I decided I'd try my hand at programming it, in C as that's closest to the C++ I know from my PC. However, I've spent all day now figuring out how best to go about this and I've hit rock bottom.

The A500 itself has only 1MB of RAM and no hard drive, so I don't think I can get any sort of compiler running comfortably on this. I've given up on this option, but I'd happily try advice from anyone who can point me towards a workable option here (or inside UAE).

My second option would be to build a cross-compiler on my trusty Linux PC. Sadly, though, I haven't been able to get GCC to build for the 68000 cpu at all, and then there's the issue with libraries..

My actual first goal with all of this, is to develop a modified version of the Transwarp software to allow it to use the X/Y/ZMODEM protocol to make transers that much more robust and to show errors immediately instead of waiting half an hour just to get a bad disk. The end result therefore must run on my paltry A500 with firmware 1.2.

Regardless of all of that.. I feel miles removed from even getting Hello World to compile, let alone my intended project. Any help would be very much appreciated!

[Leffmann]

Try vbcc, it's easy to compile and use, and is actively developed: http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc/

You also need vasm and vlink from there, and an AmigaOS NDK: http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=769595&postcount=21

I think you can run SAS/C on your 1M system, but you will have to strip the full installation to fit on a single 880K disk: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8177628/sasc658.lha

You could also run SAS/C and other Amiga CLI tools directly on your Linux using Amitools: http://lallafa.de/blog/amiga-projects/amitools/

[BvdW]

Thanks for the great tips. They're definitely useful, but not directly for my current situation as I can't find anything that'll work with Kick/WB 1.x. I'm currently looking into running Aztec C through UAE until I beef up my real Amiga enough to run a dev environment natively.

[Leffmann]

Both SAS/C and vbcc can run on, and produce code for, 1.3 and probably 1.2 as well. But if you're looking for finished installs split into 880K disks - sorry I don't know of any.

It only takes a couple of minutes to build and set up vbcc, since you mentioned cross-compilation as an option. I use it on a Mac to compile executables directly into an emulated Amiga, it's very effortless.

If you want to go the UAE-route you might as well use the full SAS/C, or one of the GCC environments such as LouiSe's dev tools for UAE: http://www.innoidea.hu/subsites/amig.../phpwebdev.php

[musashi5150]

I think the Mastering Amiga C book (Paul Overaa) came with a compiler on floppy disk...? It might have been NorthC.

DICE was another one you might be able to use.

I've never used either of these so they might be rubbish... but maybe worth a look ?

[watz]

I got my hands on some A500, too. Unlike 20 years ago, I'm capable of coding C now and eager to try it on that box :-)

I've built a cross compiling vbcc from the current sources (that now have KS1.3 support) for Windows today using this tutorial here. You can find my modified sources here and my Amiga build environment including the binaries here.

All you need to do is to change the paths ("C:\Amiga\vbcc") given in "vbcc.cmd" and "kick13.cfg" so they match your destination folder.

Using that installation, I was able to successfully run the included "helloworld" project on KS1.3/WB1.3 (with +kick13.cfg) and KS3.1/WB3.1 (with default config "vc.cfg"). I can also confirm that trying to run the app built with the default config on KS1.3/WB1.3 produces a "file is not an object module" error.

Greetings,
Watz