[A83] Re: Announcinga new TI-83 Development Suite

To: <assembly-83@lists.ticalc.org>
Subject: [A83] Re: Announcinga new TI-83 Development Suite
From: "Henk Poley" <hpoley@dds.nl>
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 11:36:30 +0100
Reply-To: assembly-83@lists.ticalc.org
> Van: Aaron St.John <aaronstj@hotmail.com>
> 
>> Erm sorry, but the GBDK (GameBoy Development Kit) never actually worked
>> with SDCC. The last beta releases (years ago) did include the SDCC but
>> it was *kinda* buggy.
> 
> I never claimed that GBDK worked with SDCC (which it did in several of
> the later versions, but that's another arguement), my claim was that GBDK
> can a huge library written in ASM for the C programmer to rely on, which
> is true.

Sorry, I misunderstood. You used SDCC together with "gameboy compiler" (or
something) quite consistently, so I thought...

The author of the GBDK told me that you'd better not use the SDCC based
versions, they're quite buggy.

>> The 'problem' is that (NB, I asked it friendly) they don't want to make
>> the compiler separate between machines (they do with processor type
>> though). So you can't specify that you compile for the Z88 or for the
>> Ti83.
> 
> This is not a problem.  Use the compiler command-line switches you can
> have it org the code at progstart, and the RAM at SaveScreen or
> whereever. Then a post-link utility can massage the outputted file into a
> .83p (kind of like Devpac83).

Thought about all the different shells? They need different startup code.
Hech there isn't even a standard one that you could use that would work in
every Ti8x calc. The calcs have minor differences (other than ROM adresses,
which can be "fixed" by using the linker) but they are there.

>> You'll need
>> to copy the right (header) files into the right directory to make things
>> work for different machines. Although it isn't impossible, it looks like
>> a PITA to me.
> 
> This is trivial.  You just need to write a new library, compile it to a 
> library called z80.lib, and drop it and the new .h files into the right 
> directory.  It would make things a bit complex if you used sdcc to
> compile other z80 stuff, but you could create a new directory for the
> ti-83 lib, and create a simple .bat file to rename the directories as
> needed.

<alert type="holy war">
Yup, but it's pretty normal with a compiler that has come as far as SDCC
that you can put this in some config file and/or add to the commandline.
Else everybody who wants to retarget the SDCC to another Z80 machine will
likely be forced to reinvent the wheel.
</alert>

	Henk Poley <><

	Henk Poley <><