Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!mcnc!rti!sas!walker
From: walker@sas.UUCP (Doug Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Disk Device Driver & Cross Development System
Message-ID: <455@sas.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 88 19:21:21 GMT
References: <347@midway.ece.scarolina.EDU>
Reply-To: walker@sas.UUCP (Doug Walker)
Distribution: na
Organization: SAS Institute Inc, Cary NC
Lines: 27
Keywords: device driver cross development

In article <347@midway.ece.scarolina.EDU> anderson@midway.ece.scarolina.EDU (Stuart Anderson) writes:
>1.	Does anybody have some code that accesses the disk drive
>hardware directly (as in device driver). If someone could send me some,
>it would save me hours of pain and grief re-inventing the wheel.
I assume you want something below the level of trackdisk.device?  If not,
check out the RKM on how to use trackdisk.device to get at the disk at
the track level.

>
>2.	Since there is a public domain C compiler and a PD assembler 
>both of which run on other machines, all we would need is a PD linker
Well, it's not PD, but it is freely redistributable - BLINK versions up
to 7.0 are available on just about any BBS, from Fred Fish, and hundreds
of other sources for free.

>This would be nice for those larger programs that require to much memory
>or disk space to be developed natively.

Any program that is too big to be developed on a 512k Amiga with two floppy
drives is not going to be developed on a PD C compiler.  I'm sorry, but I
cannot believe that a PD compiler has had all the work put into it that is
necessary to do really significant projects.  Also remember that the 
Distillery wrote BLINK and ported both HACK and LARN to the Amiga with 512K
two-drive A1000's.  LARN is so large that it will not run if workbench is
loaded on a 512k A1000.  HACK sources and objects had to be stored on different
disks because they were too big to go on one disk, but other than that there
were no problems.