GCC from ’87 on the 68000

Years ago I found the ‘first’ released version of GCC, and had built it for the VAX. And things were… fun.

While digging around on bitsavers for new and interesting things, I saw some newer stuff from MIT, and stumbled into the GNU directory and rediscovered the early GNU software depot.

And I re-built the early GCC to target the 68000 which I’d imagine primarily was for the SUN target.

simple program

Using a simple program I can run it through the pre-processor, and the compiler to get the following assembly:

assembly from ’87 GCC

Then it’s a matter of running it through the cross assembler, uuencoding it, and sending it to the target.

I used the cross assembler from the AtariST cross ‘project’, to get an object file. I fired up MachTen, pasted my object file to the VM, and uudecoded the object.

And yeah, much to my surprise the object file linked fine, and I got my native EXE.

It’s not much of a cross toolkit, and honestly it’s kind of useless… but I thought it was maybe worth a bare paragraph to show the other available target available for the 1987 release of GCC.

Also on the MIT archive is TRIX, the MIT Unix work alike that almost became the GNU Kernel, until Mach stole their hearts, and basically lead them on a wild goosechase.

I haven’t bothered uploading binaries or patches or anything yet, I don’t know if people are interesting in such a fringe thing……

9 thoughts on “GCC from ’87 on the 68000

  1. Neozeed, I have an 030 SCSI based system made by Designa in Germany. Unfortunately the SCSI disk is dead so I can’t tell what OS it would have used. Is there any way I can find out more about this system?

    • Take pictures! I can’t find anything about this system. What city in Germany? Maybe it’s an East German SUN-3 clone?

      I’m positive it’s going to be interesting!

      On another tangent I’m currently hacking on another SUN-2 emulator! I’ve been taming it a little for Win32, and I have it running on i386&ARM!

      • I’ll take some pictures and post them shortly. In Kiel apparently and I suspect it was used in embedded system as the company Designa seem to specialise in automated systems. But I can’t find anything out about it. It “reminds” me of an Amiga but it obviously isn’t. It’s an EC030 @ 40Mhz and has a PGA socket for what I would assume to be an FPU (68881/2) which isn’t populated. So no MMU and from memory I think early SUN’s used their own MMUs and not Motorola chips. It has a floppy controller, SCSI 1 controller and a whole bunch of serial I/O. It also appears to have a PCMCIA socket. Unfortunately although the SCSI drive spins up, it hangs every SCSI bus I’ve connected it to so I suspect the drive’s controller board is faulty even if the mechanics are OK.

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