Ports for C64 cross-development (here: exomizer)
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2022 15:51:36 UTC
Hi all! As we all know, FreeBSD is a "general-purpose" OS. I guess this includes purposes you never thought of. One thing *I* use it for is cross-development for the good old - Commodore 64 - :) For this very special purpose, there are already ports available you will need. Of course, emulators/vice, the arguably best emulator for these old Commodore platforms, but what's important for cross-dev: it contains a "monitor" (similar to a debugger) that's plain superior to anything "native". Then, we also have more than just one cross-assembler targeting the 6502 CPU. My personal favorite is ca65, which comes with devel/cc65, a C(!) cross-compiler. Even when not using C, it features a linker that works very much like you know it from modern platforms, with memory-areas and segments you can define in a linker config. But then, there are also things missing. Very often, you will need a cruncher on the C64. The de-facto standard nowadays is "exomizer", which is kind of a "cross-cruncher": It crunches data on the PC and contains 6502-code you can easily integrate in your projects to decrunch it on the fly. For some years now, I have ports of exomizer2 and exomizer3 in my local ports tree. They are not very polished, just enough to work for me. But then, if we have cross-assemblers that are *only* useful to people who do cross-development for the C64 and similar ... why not go the full way? I therefore plan to "polish" my exomizer ports and get them into ports main. Are there any objections? Or maybe, would someone welcome to have these available? Cheers, Felix -- Felix Palmen <zirias@FreeBSD.org> {private} felix@palmen-it.de -- ports committer (mentee) -- {web} http://palmen-it.de {pgp public key} http://palmen-it.de/pub.txt {pgp fingerprint} 6936 13D5 5BBF 4837 B212 3ACC 54AD E006 9879 F231