Programming on the Amiga

[Twin]

Hi Everybody

When I was younger I used to program in AMOS on my Amiga 1200 (I also had an A2000 and a couple of A500's), however I had to go to windows in 2000.

Anyway, now I am a qualified PC programmer but I hate PC's I want to program on the Amiga again.

Ive read about compilers and the like, but my question (its probably a stupid one) is can I program using WinUAE on my PC or shall I buy an A1200 again (Ive been looking out for one but its hard to find a good one down under).

Thanks for any help you can give me.

[iamaboringperson]

UAE is perfectly fine for programming. :-)

[that_punk_guy]

Some people prefer UAE for development because you can change configurations and things to see how the program works with different ROMs, on different CPUs, how it copes with more or less memory, etc... lots of benefits.

[Roj]

Except for the fact that UAE doesn't include the functions of an MMU, which is essential for debugging...

[that_punk_guy]

Nor can you run PPC code...

[iamaboringperson]

Nor can you run MorphOS !

[that_punk_guy]

Nor can you run Solaris!

(Sorry, that's really silly. I'm going to bed now.)

[iamaboringperson]

zzzzzZZZZZzzzzzZZZzzzZzzZZ

[that_punk_guy]

...By the way 'hapiest' has two Ps :-)

[iamaboringperson]

:lol:

Thank's for that, I was thinking about that the other day ... I thought it was a bit strange! ;-)

[Karlos]

Not really, I've often considered Melbourne to be the hapiest (pron: Haypiest) place there is :-)

Oh yeah, coding....

WinUAE is ok for 680x0 target coding, as long as you don't mind not having an MMU when it comes to a spot of tricky debugging. Mind you, I think people reach for the debug way too early - 99% of all the errors in stuff I've written have been fixed using coffee and going carefully through my source...

Sorry, digressing again - probably because I'm coding right now (why else did you expect I was sat at my computer at 4:30am ?) :-)

[Twin]

Thanks alot, I think I will use WinUAE and keep my eye out for a good A1200 and then use both.

Once Ive got 680x0 coding down OK, I will look at moving onto PPC. As I will probably be purchasing an AmigaOne once OS4 comes out.

[Dietmar]

>Except for the fact that UAE doesn't include the functions of an MMU, which is essential for debugging...

No MMU is needed for debugging and Amiga debuggers run fine on UAE (like codeprobe from SAS/C). As to Enforcer, which is the only tool that comes to mind if the MMU is mentioned, WinUAE does have its own Enforcer called "winuaeenforcer". All other debugging tools like mungwall, sushi etc. run fine with UAE, too. I see absolutely no reason to not use WinUAE for development. I use it all the time. The good thing with UAE is that it's impossible to corrupt the file system (which runs on the Windows side): You can write to a log file on the hard disk even if you know that your program will crash during the process.

[Gerbinist]

Be carefull when programming on u.a.e. not to create "sluggish" code though. Otherwise you must add stuff like: runs on Amiga, but actually needs UAE to your readme.

Anyway, nice to hear that people start coding though ;-)

[Karlos]

A good way to do that, if your PC is pretty powerful, is to run your code in interpreted mode rather than JIT. That keeps the PC throttled back sufficiently to better judge code performance ;-)