What I don't know about the Amiga...

I've been sick the last few days so instead of finishing off the Neo Geo port - which also included tackling the AI bug - when finally feeling a little better this afternoon I decided to do something a little less intense, and look at what was involved in developing Amiga software.

I knew the Amiga scene had been evolving for years after I stopped using my A500, and delving back into it in 2014 involves a whole bag of confusion. 68K vs PPC, Commodore vs new Amiga hardware, Workbench 1.3 vs 2.x vs AmigaOS 3.x vs 4.x, and AROS (still not really sure what this is)... and of course the scene assumes you already know the lay of the land. Google was my friend.

Cross-development tools seem to be thin on the ground, and those that do exist tend to be linux-based. Perhaps not surprising because a hard-disk equipped high-end Amiga is more than capable of hosting its own development toolchain. Regardless, my preference at this point was a Windows-based cross-toolchain that I could invoke from the command-line, utilising the existing makefile.

I eventually found a site that hosted the gcc (3.4.0) binaries and a bunch of libraries that ran on Windows under cygwin (not unexpected, but bleh!). After installing both and downloading a missing DLL, I could finally compile hello_world.c.

Next step was configuring an Amiga environment. Normally my go-to emulator is MESS, with its integrated debugger and simple command-line launch. But in this case I opted for WinUAE due to it being reportedly significantly more advanced than MESS when it comes to Amiga emulation. So I downloaded and installed the latest version - I won't go into details but booting from ADF (floppy image) wasn't going to cut it so I had to learn how to install onto a hard disk.

I opted to mount a (PC) directory instead of a hard disk file, mainly because it simplifies the process of transferring files to/from the emulator. After installing WB3.1 and subsequently a missing library (ixemul) I finally saw the words "Hello World!" appear in the Amiga Shell!

Next step was to create the amigaos branch of the Lode Runner project, enhance the makefile and get it compiling under the new toolchain. After stubbing out all the os-dependant routines, and enabling debug messages via stderr, I was greeted with the following:

Lode Runner on the Amiga - debug output (stderr)

So Lode Runner is actually running - albeit headless - rather nicely. I'd be worried if it weren't.

Of course now comes the interesting part, though I may deny temptation and finish off the Neo Geo port (and the C core) before progressing further on the Amiga. Or whilst on a roll, I may look at setting up the toolchain for the Sega Genesis/Megadrive...