[fpc-pascal] Error compiling on AROS/m68k: 1980-0-0 is not a valid date specification

[Karoly Balogh (Charlie/SGR)]

Hi Carsten,

On Fri, 18 Dec 2020, Carsten Strotmann via fpc-pascal wrote:

> >> I've trying FPC on an Vampire 4 SA machine with ApolloOS/AROS
> >> m68k.
> >
> > Which version of FPC are you trying? Trunk, 3.2.0 stable, you built
> > your own, or you downloaded one of the official Amiga releases?
>
> it's the one that comes pre-installed with the Vampire 4 SA. I really
> like the fact that FPC comes pre-installed. It identifies itself as
> 3.2.0 (2020/06/13) (fpc binary is 112808 bytes)

The "fpc" binary is just a compiler frontend. The actual binary is called
"ppc68k", it must be hiding in there somewhere. The question is, is the
compiler binary uses the FPU or not. It's nice that they preinstalled FPC,
but it hardly got tested it seems.

> > No, this is most likely the Vampire 4 or more specifically its FPGA
> > CPU implementation ("Apollo core") being incompatible with a true
> > m68k. Are you trying to use the SoftFPU or the hardware FPU version?
>
> is there a way to get this information from the installed binaries? As
> FPC was pre-installed, I have no idea which version the Apollo developer
> used.

I think judging by the date, it's probably the 3.2.0 release, which should
be with the SoftFPU actually. But there's no way to tell without
disassembling the binary and see if there are FPU instructions in it... Or
trying to execute with the FPU disabled.

> I've downloaded 3.2.0a (SoftFPU) from the FreePascal website, and that
> version works fine. So it might be a HardFPU version.

Or might be not. See below.

> I also see that the pre-installed version was installed with the clock
> in the system was set to the start of the Amiga Time (1.1.1978). Might
> that create a problem?

Actually, yes. If I reset the timestamp of the system unit to 1978-1-1,
00:00:00 (the start of the Amiga Epoch), I can reproduce the issue on my
system and installation (which is a real '060 + AmigaOS 3.1). So this
needs a two layer fix, first we need to fix it in our RTL, and second, it
would be nice if the Apollo people could not screw up the timestamps as
they install FPC into their distro. (They probably used a broken, older
version of LHA to extract the package, which is know to cause exactly this
issue. Or some Unix tool to package the OS install/image, which freaked
out from the Amiga timestamps.)

Cheers,
--
Charlie