Setting up StormC 3

[Vegas]

Hallo everyone! Since i am doing some programming lessons at college right now, i thought it might be fun to write something on the Amiga for a change. Unfortunately i didnt get very far. I ran into some troubles setting up StormC 3, that i found at Amiga Future (http://www.amigafuture.de/downloads....af75dd74788101) and was now hoping someone could maybe help me out.

I was able to install the package using the fixed installer from AmigaFuture. Then StormC would boot for only one time. After reset i kept getting ramlib errors. I tried several options, but with the same result.

Also the install messed up my Ramdisk icon for good, which isnt bad but weird somehow... I am using an Amiga1200 with Blizzard 1230/50, 16 MB Fast and Fpu, KS/WB 3.1 and also ClissicWB lite, which should be fine from as far as i read.

What did i miss? Has anyone experienced this alsready or has a clue? Thanks in advance, Cheers!

[Vegas]

Still no luck getting it to run on the 1200. I ran a memory check, but it seemed ok (i have not much experience with this). Then I tried several re-installs, with and without the Blizzard. When i set it up in Winuae, everything worked fine. I ran out of ideas at this point...

[funK]

Give up with that crappy compiler already, no one uses it, that's why you got no reply.
Try vbcc, gcc v2.95.3 or sas/c instead.

[Vegas]

I chose stormc 3 just because i found a little tutorial that is making use of it. Whats the problem with it?

At some point i was worried, that it might be a hardware issue. That was one reason for my post.

Anyway, thank you for the suggestions!

[funK]

Well, I haven't done any StormC v3 test myself to see if that's true, but once I read somewhere that generated code is far worse than what you get with the other Amiga compilers.
Plus, if h&p themselves ditched their own closed source compiler in favour of the open source gcc in StormC v4, and even wrote this remark in the manuals coming with it:

Installing StormC4, you also got the compilers of the StormC3 development environment. In the project-settings you can select, if you want to use the old StormC3 compilers or the new GNU-C based compilers. We advice you to use the new GNU-C based compilers. These compilers generate more accurate warnings* and thus help to make faultless programs. Your sources that compiled fine with StormC3 may need some revision to be compiled with the GNU-C based compilers without errors and warnings. But it's worth the effort. You should use the old StormC3 only, if you really need their codegeneration. These compilers will no longer be supported by HAAGE&PARTNER.

then we can safely assume they knew there was something particularly crappy/broken in their compiler.

* I think they chose to use the word "warnings" here because their marketing division told them that writing "code" instead would have been too close to reality, and we all know that PR alternate reality always wins!

[Minuous]

I use StormC 4 (among others), usually in StormC 3 mode. It has its good and bad points like most other compilers.

You could check the official mailing list (http://amigan.1emu.net/aw/stormc-l.zip) to see if others have had this issue.

I'm willing to investigate and help with this issue but I would likely need a very detailed and specific bug report.

[funK]

@Minuous

Genuine question: since you actually use it and probably made some tests/benchmarks too, what's the advantage(s) you think StormC 3 has over the other Amiga compilers?

[NovaCoder]

I also use StormC V4 but I use it in gcc mode.

I found it very easy to setup and get going with new projects, give up on 3 and move up to version 4

[Vegas]

@funk: Ok, this sounds like they dont really trust their own product too much anymore.

@Minuous: Thanks for the link, i will check it!

Originally Posted by Minuous

I'm willing to investigate and help with this issue but I would likely need a very detailed and specific bug report.

What would you need specificly?

@NovaCoder: Thanks for the suggestion. I liked the idea of having a nice ide with everything already set up, working out of the box... Well, obviously my Amiga disagreed. Anyway, StormC 4 is not free to use, afaik.

Meanwhile i continued doing some tutorials under winuae and i must say its a little more comfortable, to be honest. As i said, im not going for any fancy stuff. At the moment, i managed to open an empty window

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by funK

@Minuous

Genuine question: since you actually use it and probably made some tests/benchmarks too, what's the advantage(s) you think StormC 3 has over the other Amiga compilers?

The main two would be the Integrated Development Environment and (somewhat buggy) 64-bit arithmetic support. It is also useful for producing WarpOS code, though I must admit I have not used it for this purpose myself. These would be the main advantages when compared with something like SAS/C. Bad points would be that there are various bugs in it, and the compilation speed and the size of the resulting executable are generally inferior when compared against SAS/C.

As to what I would need to help resolve issues, "StormC would boot for only one time" is not really specific enough, what exactly happened? Eg. did you get a guru number, if so, which? If I understand correctly it is working fine under WinUAE but not on your A1200?

Have you searched the mailing list? Also there is a list of known issues (regarding StormC 4, but probably most also apply to V3) at http://amigan.1emu.net/releases/ami-code.txt

[Vegas]

@Minuous:

Thanks again for the hint. I have searched the mailing list and the ami-code.txt but havent found anything that could help me further. Looking at the protocol i wrote, i get the feeling that the problem could be really simple...

As i said, everything worked fine in winuae, what i forgot to mention was, that my winuae setup runs wb3.9 while the original Amiga runs 3.1. In my defence, until now i found no requirment note that says: wb 3.9 needed

I case, thats not it, here is some more information on what i did:

- assign AmigaFuture dir
- start "PrepairStormCinstall" (the fixed version from AmigaFuture site)
- error: cant rename ram:Stormc/Stormc_3_0 as ram_:StormC/Stormc_3_0 because oject not found
- says "ready to install" anyway
- ram-icon turns into stormc-icon (and wont change anymore after reboot)
- start ram:install_stormc_hd -> error: "cant open script"
- icon -> information -> change "SCRIPT=StormC Install-script" to actual name of install script
- start start ram:install_stormc_hd again, installation starts
- error: "unable to locate file/drawer "Stormc_3.0" not found, line 786"
- rename ram:StormC_3_0 to ram:StormC_3.0
- start start ram:install_stormc_hd again -> installation finishes
- installation protocoll is empty
- start harddisk/stormc/stormcpp
- error: "ramlib programmerror number 80000003 / wait for finishing disk activity"
- reboot
- guru: "error number 80000003 / task 0D01E048

On a different approach, i tried to avoid the first error by running "PrepairStormCinstall" twice and renaming ram_:StormC/Stormc_3_0 to ram_:StormC/Stormc_3.0 manually. It caused the install to run without errors. Unfortunately with the same guru when triying to run stormcpp.

[Minuous]

>In my defence, until now i found no requirment note that says: wb 3.9 needed

OS3.1 should be OK as StormC 3.0 (1997) predates OS3.5 (1999). Although I would suggest running OS3.9 on that machine anyway.

I'll try a test installation and see if I can reproduce and work around the issues.

[davideo]

@Vegas

Don't use the preparestormcinstall.

In my case I unpacked it into a temporary place.

Then CD to the StormC directory within that temporary place.

Rename Stormc_3_0 to Stormc_3.0. There are also a couple of other files that need renaming in the same way.

Open the Icon Install_stormc_hd_english and change the entry SCRIPT to be SCRIPT=StormC_Install_Script

Twice through the install you will have to reassign StormC to the directory you are installing it into.

After that you should be good to go.

Or at least I was the other night

Dave G

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by Vegas

- guru: "error number 80000003 / task 0D01E048

That's an odd address error which you only get on 68000 CPU's as later ones (certainly 68020+) can handle instructions starting on odd addresses.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Lonewolf10

That's an odd address error which you only get on 68000 CPU's as later ones (certainly 68020+) can handle instructions starting on odd addresses.

You probably meant data, not instructions because jump to any odd address will cause address error on all m68k CPUs.

[Vegas]

I set up os 3.9 on the amiga and everything ran fine. So, it looks like the problem really was os 3.1. I have no idea why, but it works now

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

You probably meant data, not instructions because jump to any odd address will cause address error on all m68k CPUs.

oops!