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Recommended reading for the Amiga Developer

Developing software takes a lot of knowledge. The thirst for information is endless. In this post we will make our recommendations on what to read, and they can all be found online in pdf format. The AmigaOS 3.2 Native Developer Kit The NDK contains autodocs and include files, but also examples and some documentation. Get it from the official Hyperion website  or from  Aminet . Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual: Libraries This is the first part of the Technical Reference Series by Commodore covering Release 2 of AmigaOS. and it comes with our highest recommendations. This is without a doubt the most important book to have. It deals with every library of the 2.04 except dos.library, which is covered in The AmigaDOS Manual listed below. It is not a holistic tutorial, but as the title suggests a reference manual. It is however written in an explanatory manner with for example a whole chapter about Exec Lists and contains many examples written in C. It can be found  here Amiga ROM Kernel R

About this Blog

The AmigaOS development blog contains articles written by the core AmigaOS 3.2 for 68k developers and friends. 

Our goal is to encourage and support your first steps into the fascinating realm of developing for the classic Amiga operating system.  No matter if you just want to write a small tool, a little game or a a full-blown application - starting development can provide frustrating experiences, especially on a retro operating system. 

We'd like to remedy this by providing a series of articles, covering installation of development tools, programming examples, debugging war stories and other helpful tips. 

Comments

  1. Thanks for those tutorials on how to set up SAS/C and VBCC. I'm fiddeling with DICE in order to get it working with NDK_3.2R4 ATM. Problem is how to create the DLibs for 3.2 - but this should be solvable. I'll send a description as soon as I got dice up and running with DK 3.2R4.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Adding other compilers like DICE will be very appreciated!

      Delete
    2. At least one screen capture is in german, english would be nicer.

      Delete

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Recommended reading for the Amiga Developer

Developing software takes a lot of knowledge. The thirst for information is endless. In this post we will make our recommendations on what to read, and they can all be found online in pdf format. The AmigaOS 3.2 Native Developer Kit The NDK contains autodocs and include files, but also examples and some documentation. Get it from the official Hyperion website  or from  Aminet . Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual: Libraries This is the first part of the Technical Reference Series by Commodore covering Release 2 of AmigaOS. and it comes with our highest recommendations. This is without a doubt the most important book to have. It deals with every library of the 2.04 except dos.library, which is covered in The AmigaDOS Manual listed below. It is not a holistic tutorial, but as the title suggests a reference manual. It is however written in an explanatory manner with for example a whole chapter about Exec Lists and contains many examples written in C. It can be found  here Amiga ROM Kernel R

NDK Setup for the VBCC Compiler

vbcc is a highly optimizing portable and retargetable ISO C compiler by Volker Barthelmann. It supports ISO C89 and a subset of C99. It's also still being developed and offers a variety of target distributions and cross-compiling options. Best of all: It's free. The AmigaOS distribution of vbcc is maintained by Frank Wille and can be downloaded here . Frank added support for the NDK3.2 in vbcc 0.9h, so you'll have to get this version or a later one. Installation of the compiler is simple: You'll have to download the vbbc main archive suitable for your system plus at least one Amiga-related target archive, first. We'll assume you want to compile on Amiga natively, so we choose: Main archive - AmigaOS 2.x/3.x 68020+ binaries Target Archive - Compiler target AmigaOS 2.x/3.x M680x0 (download by right-clicking the link & select "save as") Open a shell. We assume you have lha installed. If not, get it here (download by right-click

NDK Setup for the SAS/C compiler

Although its development has been discontinued some years after Commodore went under, SAS/C Version 6 still is one of the best and recommendable C-compilers for classic AmigaOS development until today. If you don't have the package, you may find it second hand or on the net. The extensive manual is a must read, comes in two large volumes and can be found here and here . We won't cover the installation of the compiler in this article, so please refer to the manual instead. Also please make sure to apply all updates up to Version 6.58.  When the compiler's installation script has concluded and you reboot for the first time, have a look at the S:User-Startup file. It should have the following additions, if you installed the compiler to the "Work" device/volume: ;BEGIN SAS/C assign sc: Work:sc assign lib: sc:lib assign include: sc:include assign cxxinclude: sc:cxxinclude path sc:c add ;END SAS/C The files which need to be replaced are found in the directories