Cut 'em out

Whilst I haven't been working on Knight Lore code per se, I have done some work that will ultimately assist in the optimisation.

I need a profiler, and since none of the Coco3 emulators have that functionality, I have to roll my own. My first preference was to hack MAME/MESS, but the barrier-to-entry is rather high. So the next candidate is Vcc.

Unfortunately Vcc currently compiles under Microsoft Visual C, which I actively try to avoid in my own projects, preferring GNU or otherwise open source toolchains. So I decided to try my hand at porting Vcc to GCC/MINGW. After hitting a few roadblocks that had me stumped for a day or two, I managed to finally get it all building and running! Mostly.

There wasn't a lot of code to modify, in fact about 10 lines in a handful of files. One problem I couldn't figure out how to overcome was a call to AfxInitRichEdit() which is part of MFC and therefore not available under GCC. Interestingly there is a RICHED20 library in the GCC/MINGW distribution which supposedly implements AfxInitRichEdit2(), but I had no luck. Somewhat encouragingly though, the documentation suggests that it's not always necessary to call this function.

So the solution for now was - Cut 'em out!

There are a couple of issues with the GCC build - for example the tape configuration dialog is mysteriously blank - but the real stick-in-the-mud for me is the fact that Knight Lore doesn't actually run. Galactic Attack ran just fine, so perhaps it's an issue with 32KB cartridges?

It's never easy, is it?

UPDATE: There was/is an issue with 32KB cartridge images; Vcc expects the two 16KB banks to be swapped - for some unknown reason - unlike MAME/MESS and also unlike you'd burn to FLASH or EEPROM for that matter. I've done a quick hack for myself so that Knight Lore will run as-is.

The tape configuration dialog was blank because it contained rich edit controls; after adding a call to explicitly load riched20.dll that's now sorted too.

That's the last of the obvious GCC/MINGW issues.

Now I should be able to start on the profiling functionality!