Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!julian!uwovax!4225_5257
From: 4225_5257@uwovax.uwo.ca
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Amiga object file format and Blink
Message-ID: <2115@uwovax.uwo.ca>
Date: 24 Apr 89 16:02:48 GMT
Lines: 35
Organisation: University of Western Ontario, Canada


   I'm fairly new (okay, completely new) to programming on the Amiga in 
anything other than AmigaBASIC.
   Lately, I've been poking around in all the PD source code and magazines that
I have, and I've managed to write a few simple programs with Charlie Gibbs'
A68k assembler (using Blink and small.lib).
   Anyway, here's the problem:

   I had a program which opened a custom screen, opened a backdrop window on 
said screen and attached a menu to it.  This worked fine.  I also opened up
a regular window on the screen and played with it a bit (learning about
IDCMP stuff), and generally had fun learning about Intuition stuff without
having the proper documentation (i.e. no RKMs yet).
   I made the front window in my program have its own bitmap by setting the
CUSTOM_BITMAP flag and pointing to a bitmap that I set up.  That worked 
only sometimes, and I soon discovered it was because the bitmap data had to
reside in CHIP memory.  So...
   I had trouble getting the SECTION directives to work right in A68k if I
had a source file with multiple sections, so I split off the bitmap data
into a separate file, with a first line like: SECTION mydat,DATA,CHIP
and left the main program with no section header.
   Now when I try to use Blink to link it all together with:
       Blink prog.o bitmap.o small.lib to prog
   the resulting file isn't loadable by AmigaDOS!  I get a "not an object file
" error.

   I don't know anything about the object file format that Amy DOS uses, so
I can't be sure of exactly what is going wrong.  I am using the version of 
A68k and Blink that came together on Fish #110.

   Am I doing something really stupid?

   Help!!!

...Steve van der Burg