Experienced Developer, but new to Amiga

[plbyrd]

Hello!

I'm a very experienced developer, but I'm new to Amiga development.  I'm quite comfortable in C/C++ and am really looking for advice on the best way to approach several things.

First, I'd like to know what cross-development tools you guys recommend.  For doing cross-development on the CBM 8-bit machines I use Visual Studio 2010 and the cc65 compiler chain.  From what I've gathered on the net over several hours of browsing, I should be able to come up with something similar with Visual Studio 2010 and gcc.  I do not currently have gcc installed on my cross-development system, so I would need to install that.  That brings up my first question:  Once I install gcc to my Win7 system, is it ready to compile OS 3.x 68020 binaries out of the box?

I have already found, downloaded and played with AmiDevCpp.  It seems like a capable IDE, but I couldn't figure out how to execute its compiler from Cygwin (probably due to lack of good documentation for the software).  I was wondering if anyone else bothers with using it or if I should just got the VS/gcc route?

My next questions are about programming GUIs.  Are there any tools available (for any platform) that can allow visual development of Intuition or MUI forms that spit out the appropriate C or C++ code?  If not, where's some really good documentation on the APIs for Intuition and MUI?  

Thanks for any help as I'm really looking forward to getting my hands dirty pretty quickly.

[plbyrd]

Maybe AROS is the way to go, develop on that platform, your work should be portable back to a 68k Amiga

Thanks for the reply.  I'm really looking to get this working under Windows as I have a wonderful and comfortable development environment set up on my Win7 workstation through my CBM 8-bit work.  What would be great for me is getting VS 2010 working with the appropriate version of gcc and so any help in doing so would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

[plbyrd]

I've pieced together the underlying development environment of Cygwin and GCC used by AmiDevCpp and now am compiling from BASH without a problem.  I've found a good generic makefile that doesn't require putting each source file in the makefile, so I don't have to manage the project in AmiDevCpp any longer.  Now I've just got to solve one riddle and I'll have Visual Studio 2010 doing builds using the make file.

[plbyrd]

Nice one plbyrd. :-) Have you got any ideas for projects you'd like to try out first?

Yes.  I have a game written down on paper to do.  I'm going to write it for the C64 first using CONIO and then port it to NCurses and then release it on the Amiga.  I know people prefer graphics for games, but this one will fit well in text, I do believe.