Re: Looking for 65C816 Cross Dev Tools

["Mike Westerfield" <MikeW50@aol.com>]

----------
In article <7s9j7r$dfe$1@chico.htc.honeywell.com>, lowry@htc.honeywell.com
(Dave Lowry) wrote:


> I have purchased used copies of ORCA C and Pascal that I run
> on a real GS. They are very nice tools, but it's unclear to me
> how they would be used as a cross-dev system for a standalone board.

Pretty much the same was as any other cross development tool.

Basically, you have two issues that you will need to deal with if you decide
to use the ORCA tools to develop for other platforms.  For what it's worth,
you'll be following a well-worn path: The ORCA tools, especially ORCA/C,
have been used for cross development for years.  You might be surprised at
how much SNES work was done from an Apple IIGS!

1. You need to convert the program from GS/OS OMF format to binary images.
There is a utility in ORCA/M that does this for 64K or smaller programs,
which pretty much accounts for all of the normal cross development work.  If
you don't have and don't want ORCA/M, I'd be happy to e-mail the utility to
you.  If you need to handle more than 64K, you'll need to write some
adaptations for it; you're welcome to the source code if you need to do
that.

2. You'll need to change any libraries you use to run on the target machine.
That would be try in any cross-development system, though.  In particular,
you'll need to rework the startup and shutdown code, and if you use it, the
memory management code, text I/O subsystem and floating-point libraries.
The first three are pretty easy.  Floating-point is a bear, but it's rarely
needed for imbedded systems. If you do need it, I happen to have 65816
floating-point routines now.  They are not in exactly the right format for
ORCA libraries, but they are close.

I think you'll find that everything I mentioned for #2 is true for any
cross-development system, with the possible exception of floating-point.
I'm not aware of any companies that developed floating-point for 65816
cross-development, though.  In fact, I'm only aware of 3 complete packages:
Apples, mine, and one built into a BASIC compiler.

If you'd like to explore any of these ideas further, let me know.

Mike Westerfield