[fpc-devel]some m68k releated stuff

[Balogh, Karoly (Charlie/iNQ)]

Hi,

On 2003-03-29, Carl Eric Codere wrote:

>          Apart from testing the basic instructions FADD/FMOVE, etc
> on the Amiga version i did not test much, i know that Pierre added
> instructions which might not be supported by the 68060 hardware,
> maybe there lies the problem? But you say that Amiga emulates all 
> these correctly?

Yes it emulates all of them of course. There is 68040.library for 
'040 CPU's and 68060.library for '060 CPU's. These libraries contains
support code for these CPU's. These libraries loaded by SetPatch 
at boot-time. After the libs got loaded, they install their 
exception handler, and traces all invalid instruciton exceptions, 
and  emulates unsupported but valid instructions if found. 

I used lot of unsupported FPU instruction in my previous assembly
codings, for eg. for generating sin/cos tables and such. And they
never made any problems, the exception handler just took care of
them.

> Can you please send me the code which gives problems... We'll try 
> to fix it asap!

Okay, i'll hunt down what's causing my troubles, and send some code...

>> Second, is there a chance to get '020 style addressing supported in
>> inline assembly? So to use (1234,a0) instead of 1234(a0). Well, it's 
>> not that important, but can come handy in some cases...
> Heu, maybe in 1.1? (If i ever do 680x0 on 1.1...)

Please do. The compiler performs very well on my 68060, so this baby
has enough power to compile big projects using FPC. In fact, FPC
even outperforms most 'traditional' Amiga C compilers on this machine. 
And there is no other good (and up to date) Pascal compilers for 
Amiga. And there are lots of Amiga ppl. i know, who just don't want
to switch to any of the new PPC machines, but stay with their good
old Lady, as long as possible...

> Since you are the main person worknig on the Amiga currently, 
> did you have serious problems with the compiler and the
> generated code? Please report any serious problem, and we'll
> try to fix it!

No, the compiler basically works very well, i really only miss some
features (like lineinfo unit), and ofcourse this FPU stuff goes onto 
my nerves. But the compiler and the generated code (again not counting 
the FPU stuff) is very stable, and i really do not had any serious 
problems with it. 

Anyway, i'm not the only one who uses the Amiga version, i know
at least two other ppl. here in Hungary, who follow closely the 
happenings around the Amiga port. Well, not much, but don't forget
there is still no official 1.0.x for Amiga, and the 0.99.5d is
not too useful, since it's unstable, and also has many features
missing... And this is only for Hungary (with ~300 active Amiga
users altogether...). 
 
>> And for last, are there any jobs open for volunteers in the
>> m68k/amigaos port? I'd really like to make myself useful
> Nils Sjoholm has helped a lot since he has ported all Amiga
> includes to pascal! Yes, I really need help in debugging the 
> bugger...

Yes, Nils did a pretty good job on this. On my side... well,
i plan to port as much of my previous and current pC works to 
Amiga as possible, and i need a good FPC port for that. So, 
we'll see what can i do... :)

Anyway, my current and largest problem is that i can't cycle
a compiler on my Amiga, so i have to use a Linux/x86 box
to cross-compile a new compiler every time. I've installed
all necessary tools (i think), but i just get the following 
message:

10.Work:Develop/FPC/fixes/fpc/compiler> make compiler
Makefile:17: *** You need the GNU utils package to use this Makefile.  
Stop.

Ideas? :) I'll take a look again on my GNU utils stuff, 
but i think everything is available, and on the path... 

Bye,
-- 
Charlie/iNQ
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