Compiling under emulation?

Ive been told Digikey is getting in 200 C2 beagles on Tuesday. I’m close to having hardware to play with (my order is in) and I’d like to get involved with the porting effort. I have 2 problems, I don’t have the Castle C++ suite (though I’m told it’s still being sold) and I don’t have a native RiscOS machine to run it on. If I buy the suite is it feasable to compile the sources under an emulator and if so which?

You haven’t indicated which host platform is preferable…

I haven’t actually tried, but see no reason why you can’t compile under RPCEmu. It probably won’t be super-fast, but it should work. For best compatibility you can compile on an emulated ADFS disc, but I think if you compile on EmuFS (formerly HostFS) you should be able to share files with the host OS (CVS client etc). There are possibly some gotchas for filetyping (eg Linux has a file ‘foo’ and the build replaces it with a file ‘foo,fff’ – which map to the same file under RISC OS) which might possibly trip up the build – give it a try, and if it falls over use an emulated ADFS disc.

Getting more esoteric, you /may/ be able to run the compilers in QEmu user mode (see the GCCSDK site for details) on Linux. As the compilers will effectively be Linux commands, this is much faster. But the rest of the build system would probably need some tweaking, especially doing without the GUI control panel. Probably a distraction if you want to work on porting.

If you have VRPC I suspect that will work just fine too. You could also try RPCEmu under Windows or Mac OS, but I have no experience of those.

Thanks Theo,

Getting the beagle went more smoothly than getting the C++ Suite, iyonix gave me no confirmation or reply to emails at all. Posted a week after I ordered, possibly with some encouragement by Steve. The cc compiler on the suite CD being fake and you have to download a working copy with your name embedded from the iyonix website after registering, that’s cute, that’s really cute.

I’m trying a few emulators and I’m as far as getting compile errors from the OMAP3Dev compile using !Build so this is a good sign I think.

You can order the Tools CD direct from ROOL now, although we’ve not set up the payment page just yet. In our build of the tools, you don’t have all that nonesense with downloading your copy of cc!