[fpc-devel] Questions regarding m68k-atari target

[Karoly Balogh]

Hi,

On Mon, 7 Feb 2022, Thorsten Otto via fpc-devel wrote:

> > but going with this would probably mean giving up TOS support.
>
> Yes, that 8.3 restriction might be the worst that was ever made. But
> even unices of that time allowed only 14 character long filenames.

It is also the main reason why I personally only thought about Atari as a
cross-only target, and not something I really want to run the compiler on,
apart from "proof of concept".

> I think you should not care about that restriction. There are ways to
> get around that (using mint, magic, vfat partitions, emulators...).

But this re-raises the idea of doing a separate MINT target... ;) Which
could happily use long file names, and the original "legacy" TOS could
stay 8.3. But well, I'm no Atari expert.

> And for the units, its not a problem in most cases (i guess all that
> fcl-* stuff will never get ported to Atari).

A lot of the FCL stuff is platform independent, so most of it either
already compiles, or should compile as soon as some thin or simple
platform dependent layer gets implemented. This isn't always the case, but
most of it works on Amiga-likes, and it wasn't the hardest thing to get
working.

Charlie