Category Archives: gcc

Shoebill ported to Windows!

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Shoebill!

Shoebill!

Good news, as mentioned here, the Shoebill emulator was recently given some much needed SDL love, and ported to Linux.

Well that’s great and all, but the vast majority of people who run anything these days do it with Windows.  So I decided to try to get it to compile with MinGW to see how far I could get.

And the short version is that I got it working!

The long version is that in the first pass there is some SIGUSR2 stuff that is undefined.  And for a good reason, since it won’t work.  So I just commented them out.  The next minor problem was the lack of bzero.  Honestly I don’t know why bzero is missing from MinGW, but who knows why.

Shoebill also processes some internal macros with a perl script that for some reason was dropping in binary values into the source, making GCC mad.  I just commented out a line that was adding in more comments into the header.  This let me compile with a simple pass.

There was some issues reading the ROM file, since the 68000 is a BIG ENDIAN processor, and the 8086 is LITTLE ENDIAN, Shoebill makes extensive use of hotns and hotnl, ntohl, and ntohll.  These can be found in the winsock library, and even better they dont need any winsock initialization, they work right away.  I just have to make sure I include winsock2.h, and link against the winsock library.

However when trying to boot, the checksum was 0x00000000, not the expected value!   Luckily there was an assert to catch that and crash.  This led me to notice that in Linux files are opened in binary mode by default, while on Windows, they are opened in ASCII mode.  A quick change of all the fopen calls, and I was reading the ROM, but now crashing on the disk.

As it turns out newer versions of GCC go all crazy when it comes to structs, and try to automatically align to boundaries for quick access.  Which sound nice, until you try to read in some binary data, and expect things to be in certain locations and find out that your structure is larger than expected, and data is read in the wrong place.

The solution is to force the compiler to leave it alone with

__attribute__ ((__packed__))

HOWEVER as luck would have it, Microsoft apparently packs structures a different way, and you have to either make a macro to do a bunch of work to force it to make the structure 1:1 of what you expect, or use the CFLAG option of

-mno-ms-bitfields

And now MinGW’s GCC will build something along the lines of what it’d build on Linux.

Putting it all together, I amazingly got this!

Shoebill on Windows

Shoebill on Windows

Phew!  So for those interested, here is the source code drop(Use the updated one here!), and here is the binary.

If you ever wanted to see the “OS X” of the 1980’s, now is your chance!

Public Domain Operating System

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So, I came across this project from some random google search on Watcom the other day.  Simply put it is a MS-DOS API that is supported in both a 16bit real mode operating system, and a 32bit operating system.  It is quite sparse but very interesting all the same.  Using the ancient EMX port of GCC you can build 32bit (simple) programs, and run them in the 32bit DOS like Operating System.  What makes this even more interesting is that there is a port to the IBM 370, and 390 based hardware, along with the fictional 380.

Screen Shot 2013-09-16 at 6.40.03 PM

PDOS-16 booting in Qemu 1.6

Screen Shot 2013-09-16 at 6.39.47 PM

PDOS-32 booting in Qemu 1.6

You can download my diskimages, (VMDK & floppy disk) that I’ve used with Qemu to build & boot PDOS both 16bit and 32bit.

The included libc & system libraries are lacking compared to real MS-DOS, but this is public domain code, and with a bit of TLC it could be made into something much more.

AmiDevCpp

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Antoni sent me a link to this project, AmiDevCpp. It is a nice little wrapped up IDE for cross compiling applications for the following platforms:

  • AmigaOS (m68k)
  • AmigaOS4 (PPC)
  • MorphOS(PPC)
  • AROS (i386, ppc and x86_64).

Naturally it doesn’t work correctly on Wine.. .Oh well, but for you Windows users out there that haven’t installed Cygwin this is an easy way to cross build stuff for the ancient Amiga platform.

Apparently he was able to rebulid the infamous aclock using this cross compiler…

Hack 1.0.3 for Xenix (i386)

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Hack

I figured that since I could build hack for some ancient 4BSD flavors that I should be able to build hack for good old fashioned Xenix.

And it all seems to work as it should!

I used the source from here, and only had to do a few small modifications to get it to compile and run on Xenix via GCC 1.37.1 .

You can download my binary, and source mods.

I’ve managed to keep this instance of Xenix up for 19 hours, I was thinking about doing some kind of public access to this system, but I don’t know if people would even be vaguely interested..

But if you want access, I can set you up.

Although all that is of interest is ‘dungeon’, fortune, hack, robots, and ircII …

 

Good news on the QEMU fronts!

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First I found this blog post about building Qemu with CLANG instead of GCC, and I didn’t  even run it through google translate, but I had a feeling that it must work because there is simply too much text there for something that doesn’t work… Although it is with the TCG interpreter…

Qemu 1.1.0-1 on OS X 10.6.8 via clang!

And sure enough it works! (well so far I’ve only booted the IBM PS/1 MS-DOS 4.00 image I had handy. But that is good news for me as I’m planning on shifting away from running Windows all the time, and it was annoying having this powerful mac pro, but not being able to run / play with Qemu.

The move the clang would make sense as I under stand it Apple is moving away from GCC at any rate.

Also on the road to a non TGC build of Qemu I did find out the compiler included on the 10.6.3 DVD works while the later IOS update one does not…

Using built-in specs.
Target: i686-apple-darwin10
Configured with: /private/var/tmp/llvmgcc42/llvmgcc42-2336.1~3/src/configure –disable-checking –enable-werror –prefix=/Developer/usr/llvm-gcc-4.2 –mandir=/share/man –enable-languages=c,objc,c++,obj-c++ –program-prefix=llvm- –program-transform-name=/^[cg][^.-]*$/s/$/-4.2/ –with-slibdir=/usr/lib –build=i686-apple-darwin10 –enable-llvm=/private/var/tmp/llvmgcc42/llvmgcc42-2336.1~3/dst-llvmCore/Developer/usr/local –program-prefix=i686-apple-darwin10- –host=x86_64-apple-darwin10 –target=i686-apple-darwin10 –with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.1.00)

GCC for update for IOS 5 … which doesn’t build a working Qemu exe

Using built-in specs.
Target: i686-apple-darwin10
Configured with: /var/tmp/gcc/gcc-5646~6/src/configure –disable-checking –enable-werror –prefix=/usr –mandir=/share/man –enable-languages=c,objc,c++,obj-c++ –program-transform-name=/^[cg][^.-]*$/s/$/-4.2/ –with-slibdir=/usr/lib –build=i686-apple-darwin10 –with-gxx-include-dir=/include/c++/4.2.1 –program-prefix=i686-apple-darwin10- –host=x86_64-apple-darwin10 –target=i686-apple-darwin10
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)

While the one that does come on the 10.6.3 DVD works fine.

Next up for all those of you on Windows or Win32 i386 platforms, rainbow has kindly provided a Win32 build of Qemu, which you can download from his site!  Ive booted MS-DOS on it from within VirtualBOX and it seems to work fine!

One thing I’ve noticed about 1.1.0 is that it cannot read low density 3 1/2″ disks!!!!

DJGPP 1.03 saved thanks to shovelware + cd.textfiles.com

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I can’t stress enough just how awesome cd.textfiles.com is for finding ancient stuff!

I’m not sure why I started on this quest but I was looking for some old finicky DOS extender, and started hunting for Go32, the first DOS extender used by DJGPP.  And for the heck of it, I wanted to find the first version, which I pretty much had assumed was lost to the mists of time.

However the CD-ROM shareware collection called MegaROM-1 actually had a ‘full’ copy of one of the first versions of DJGPP, 1.03.

Installation is pretty straightforward, however you have to use pkunzip for all the various old ‘methods’ of storing data in zip files, I found infozip leaves things out..

Also DJGPP 1.03 uses a LOT of environment space.. which is more so a problem for people running real MS-DOS on real machines.. (there are some!)…

Hello World!

It runs in DOSBox, but there is no doubt some stack corruption as trying to run things like dos edit result in:

Packed file is corrupt

But at least we can run more than one copy, or use a native editor.

GO-32 from this era is *NOT* DPMI compliant, nor is it VCPI compliant.  And its based on GCC 1.39, which was a popular level with things like 386 BSD, although it seems early Linux used GCC 1.40 ..  The tool chain by default outputs the GNU a.out format, but relies on modifying the linker that was separately included in G++.  Later versions of GO32 included VCPI support, and near it’s end of life version 1.10 added support for DPMI which greatly simplified things like hooking IRQ’s and doing DMA.

For those who want to play, without the pkzip fun, I’ve slapped it into a single 7zip file.  It’s not even a megabyte.  But it was 1991, when 4MB of ram seemed like an incredible amount of memory!

25 years of GCC!

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In 1987 the first announcement went out that Stallman had introduced perhaps the most important piece of GNU software ever:  GCC.

I haven’t been able to locate the 1.0 release or even the 0.9 beta (*Edit as an update, yes I’ve found it, and installed it!), as close as I could find was 1.21 from May 1st, 1988. Even at this time, GCC supported the following CPUs:

  • m68k
  • ns23k
  • spur
  • vax
Amazingly GCC at this point is pretty snappy, and very ANSI compliant unlike PCC.  At this point it still relies on native assemblers, linkers, librarians it still was pretty versatile. Back then there was no auto configuration tools you have to link configuration scripts by hand but even on VAX BSD it builds somewhat straightforward (providing you read the documentation)..

GCC 1.21 on 4.2 BSD

I don’t know if it serves any practical value but I went ahead and built a source package for GCC 1.21, along with a 4.2 BSD binary package.. I suspect it’d only be an interest to a select few.. Although if anyone has 1.0 or 0.9 I’d be interested!

By 1991 GCC 1.40 supported not only the i386, but Linux kernel.. And as they say the rest is history.

And finally a video summation of all the changes to GCC…

 

On the way to building Qemu 1.0…

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Well one of the fun things is that Qemu now relies on glib.  But in order to build glib it needs pkg-config. And of course you can believe that pkg-config requires glib in order for it to work.  Good lord, nothing like circular dependencies!!!

So what to do?  First things first libffi will be needed to build glib.  It doesn’t seem to have any crazed dependancies so that built ok.  Also something I’ve been missing in a lot of ‘native’ MinGW builds is to add:

–prefix=/mingw

to the configure strings to get things in a location where the system will find them.  For some reason MinGW doesn’t walk /usr/local .. I guess because its not UNIX. With libffi built then you can configure/build glib like this:

export LIBFFI_CFLAGS='-I /mingw/lib/libffi-3.0.10/include'
export LIBFFI_LIBS=-lffi
export lt_cv_deplibs_check_method="pass_all"
export CFLAGS='-O0 -g -pipe -Wall -march=i486 -mms-bitfields -mthreads'
export CPPFLAGS='-DG_ATOMIC_OP_USE_GCC_BUILTINS=1'
export LDFLAGS=”-Wl,--enable-auto-image-base”
./configure --prefix=/mingw --with-pcre=internal --disable-static --disable-gtk-doc --enable-silent-rules

Then it is a simple matter of building out pkg-config then rebuilding glib in a ‘sane’ fashion.  This all comes form the MinGW wiki which has great information on how to do things like bootstrap glib!

And don’t forget to install python! Even Qemu needs it now!

And add it to /etc/profile so it will be in your path…

  export PATH=”.:/usr/local/bin:/mingw/bin:/bin:/c/python27:/c/python27/dlls:$PATH”

Solaris 11 came out today

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They blew the 11/11/11 launch date.  I guess Oracle really just doesn’t care about magical numbers or whatever.

I guess for the two or three people who even run this stuff (no doubt to run Oralce and it’s draconian licensing) you can find out all about it here.

It appears they still keep the Fortran stuff around for it…  Oh and this release is x86_64 only.  Sorry 32bit users.

Installing gcc (and I imagine everything else) revolves around the pkg command… In this case ‘pkg install gcc-3’ will download and install gcc 3.  While ‘pkg install gcc-45’ will install GCC 4!.  Don’t forget to install system/header or you won’t have things like stdio.h!!

Another GCC tidbit, is that you can build 64bit binaries with GCC 4.5 by supplying the -m64 flag!

While Solaris 11 installs somewhat quickly in VirtualBox (but wow does it take forever to boot), it is bare minimum…

Also for those who want it, here is lynx & ircII for Solaris Oh and a Quake World Server.  At least wget is in the base, but I don’t see why lynx isn’t.