GFA on the FireBee

GFA on the FireBee

Messagede lp060 » Dim 21 Aoû 2011 10:50

In case anyone is wondering it does not work. GBE does not work either. Its a bit technical, but it has to do with the move.b instruction when used on the stack, which the coldfire handles differently.
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede tomchi » Dim 21 Aoû 2011 11:51

Bad news as it seems that some firebee owners were planning to use GfA ... It could have been a second life ^^'
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede lp060 » Dim 21 Aoû 2011 12:30

It also means programs written with GFA probably won't work either. I did an extensive search of the sources and there are 231 occurrences of move.b to or from the stack spread across all the components, except the linker, it might work as is. GBE fails because it uses code from the old editor, plus its built with the GFA library.
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede lp060 » Jeu 25 Aoû 2011 10:25

Well GFA can't be the only software with problems, so maybe it will push the ACP project to come up with a solution for really old, heavily optimized software.

I am working on GFA anyway. Still tons of dis-assembly to figure out and comment and some minor bugs yet.
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede lp060 » Ven 16 Sep 2011 18:17

I think it might be possible to have a coldfire version of the library. Looking in the sources most of the fixes are trivial compared to the rest of the components. That means one could rebuild their app with a special library and get a working coldfire app. It would likely run on older machines but with reduced performance. That's why I would make it a separate library. Also all coding work would have to be done on some other machine. At the moment this is the best idea I have.
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede lafleche » Mer 21 Sep 2011 14:37

Hi Lonny,

Thank you for at least trying it.
I suppose the problem you mention is close to what is written here :

http://www.microapl.co.uk/Porting/ColdF ... 8KLib.html

I hope you'll manage to make it work in a way or another, as it is the only way to have GFA Basic running on a modern machine
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede lp060 » Mer 21 Sep 2011 18:20

Well I have not tried it yet. Its just an idea thus far. Its possible it won't get done.

On technical side, its related to move.b to the stack, the coldfire handles this differently and the CFLib cannot correct it. The 680x0 keeps the stack even, the coldfire don't which leads to trouble. Unfortunately the author of GFA used move.b to the stack to decode words on an odd address and he used it a lot. Something like 231 occurrences would need to patched to get all of GFA working.
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede lp060 » Dim 23 Oct 2011 19:27

Since some machines have been shipped to certain people and I've gotten mail about GFA, here is a page I made explaining the reason why GFA is not working. Some technical ramblings with examples assembler: http://userpages.bright.net/~gfabasic/html/gfa_cf.htm
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede lp060 » Jeu 13 Sep 2012 22:14

Well here I am again visiting this topic. However, this time its good news. I have built a new library for Coldfire. All one has to do is recompile a GFA program to get it running on the Firebee. I tested it with one of my own rather large projects with success. There are some catches.

1) Its a direct port of my current library, not an old library.
2) It requires my current compiler. The GFA compiler is now working at the Firebee. I fixed that too.
3) It relies on the CFLib provided by FireTOS, so GFA is not running full speed on the Firebee, but its better than nothing.
4) GFA on the Firebee will be a compile only language as I have no plans to fix the interpreter (runonly). It has way to many problems and would take forever.

I have also fixed my GFA editor (aka GBE), still untested, but I'm fairly sure it will now work at the Firebee.

I am not abandoning the 68K machines. The plan is to always provide 2 versions of the library. If you are a GFA author and want to provide binaries for everyone, then you would need to build 2 versions of your app for distribution.
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Re: GFA on the FireBee

Messagede tomchi » Sam 15 Sep 2012 06:22

congrats for the job you've done, hope you'll get some positive feedback from firebee owners.
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