I figure I best dust off my programming glasses and start consider
progamming again. I really enjoyed it as a hobby but, haven't had
much time to spend on hobbies these days.

I would like to know what programming languages are native to MOS?

In particular I was thinking of porting an old starship combat
simulator game I made eons ago. I need to use a language that is
developed enough to handle disk I/O, arrays, mathmatical logic, audio,
and graphics. It's look/feel/play are very similar to Mechforce by
Ralph Reed (pretty sure that was his name). Any old time Amiga folks
will remember that it was the conversion of FASA's
Battletech. It was the overhead view of the playing board.

Anyways thanks for the help.

Matt

Quote:
FreePascal, GCC (so you've got C and C++). I don't know Rebol port status. Java's not here. Well, that's all, I guess. ;p

IIRC 68k Amiga Rebol works on Pegasos, but even with JIT it's kinda slow ... I doun't Native port ever happens.

IMHO it's a shame things has gone as they are.. BlitzMax (adwanced Blitz basic with OpenGL support) would look nice on Pegasos. But as it is.. I'm not gonna ask for a port

PS: In case someone has Mac and is planing to make programs for it (and port them to Windowse+linux)
http://www.blitzbasic.co.nz/

All? You forgot about asm

I suppose, with "native" you mean either an interpreter that exists as a ppc native binary or a compiler that can output PPC binaries.
AFAIK these are your choices:

Assembler
C
C++
Draco ( in combination with a C compiler)
E
(Free)Pascal (other Pascal Dialects in combination with a C compiler)
Java (Compiler, but incomplete Runtime Environment)
Perl
PowerD
Python
Hollywood
Lisp
Oberon (not sure about this)
OPS5 ( in combination with a C compiler)
OCAML ( in combination with a C compiler)

a Modula2 compiler seems to being worked at.

Thanks for the great feedback.

Looks like C may be the best choice.

I already own SAS C. What version of C do you guys use on MOS and
what is the best version to use with MOS?

Why would you need a C compiler with Free Pascal?


Best Regards,

Matt

As Mechforce (later renamed to Battleforce) is a clone of FASA's Battletech, would your space strategy game be a copy of FASA's Renegade Legion Interceptor then?

Quote:
Basically it's gcc or vbcc. I think I would recommend gcc, as I use it more (and it comes with MOS SDK)

Hi Jupp3,

I really did like Renegade Legion Intercepter but, this game is based
on the Star Trek Combat Simulator that FASA created.

One last lazy question, where do I get the latest gcc and MOS SDK?

Thanks!

Matt

p.s. if I ever get this game to a playable state would you like to try
a beta version?

Quote:
Yes, armour was done in quite nice way (although I guess it would work better on computer game than on a board game...)
Quote:
You can get the SDK from http://mdc.morphos.net
There's updated gcc available somewhere else, but I think you should first install the only one...

And I didn't have any problems with the "old" gcc on any of my own projects (ldview, puzzle, blockmorph etc.) anyway...

Quote:
Actually you don't need a C compiler with Free Pascal. But you might need one for other Pascal compilers (eg. for GNU Pascal) but i don't think that's available for MorphOS anyway. (It could be ported, but no one did that until now, AFAIK.)

Pascal:

There are some Pascal -> C Compilers in Aminet...


To complete my list of PPC languages: there's also a Forth (PPCcForth) interpreter.

Pascal -> C compilers usually support much less Pascal constructs, due to the nature of the conversion they're doing (eg. no Pascal-style strings, no OOP, no function/operator overloading, etc). Also most of the standard Pascal run-time library functions are missing in this case. So i generally do not recommend using such "compilers". :)

Thanks for all the help!

I'm just waiting for a response a password for the morph developer website. Haven't heard anything yet however...

Sounds like the free pascal isn't ready for development on so I guess I'll use c.

Matt



[ Edited by matt3 on 2005/1/26 22:26 ]

I never got a reply from the morphos.dev site for 2 month. Let me know, if you get any
reply .....
Why is there any barrier to get docs to progg for an OS ?
Linux doesn't have any .. so it's programmers heaven ..

Is there any way else to acquire the C compiler and docs?

Buy GoldED :)

Quote:
Hey, there's even Amos -> C converter out there!

And it does work quite nicely, but only makes moving a project from Amos to C easier, it doesn't produce "ready-to-compile" code.

Jupp3 says:

Quote:

Funny that there should be such a thing, but too bad that it doesn't produce ready-to-compile code, as you said.

Some time ago I tried Pure Basic and AmiBlitz. Each of those programs launched at partially ran but were not quite usable, some functions didn't work or they would crash if you tried to do certain things. It seemed to me that it wouldn't be terribly difficult for the maintainers of those languages to make MOS versions that work, if they had developer Pegasoses. I don't really know though.

I think that AmiBlitz can be a good development environment for MOS *on a 68K Amiga system* which is what I think Thilo Köhler did to make the great action game AsteroidsTR.

Hollywood may be an option, like somebody said. Hollywood has some rough edges IMO, but it does support 68K and Amithlon and MorphOS.

Now you can add E language. PPC compiler has been put to public use.

http://home.swipnet.se/blubbe/ECX

>I never got a reply from the morphos.dev site for 2 month. Let me
>know, if you get any reply .....
>Why is there any barrier to get docs to progg for an OS ? Linux
>doesn't have any .. so it's programmers heaven..

You could try to contact bbrv/genesi about it.
They fully administrate the mdc website.

Quote:

That's cool! I never was much of a serious programmer but I tinkered a bit with E on the Amiga way back, and I liked it a lot. Has anyone tested this on PPC/MorphOS? Is everything working, is it fully PPC and does it generate as compact binaries as the 68k E compiler did? Pros/cons?

Quote:

http://www.amigazeux.org/ folks seem to use it already.

hi,

I don't know much about E, how difficult is it to learn, is it comparable with Pascal or M2 ?

To my experience it's somewhere in between Pascal and C. There is good documentation on Aminet and many modules for various library functions.

Well, E is more than that !

Most languages have a specific philisophy they obey.

The one of E is practical usability. It tries to combine the advantages of quite different languages in one single language:
It is a procedural, modular language with a Wirth (Pascal/Modula/Oberon) like syntax.
It has OOP.
It has lots of functions known from C.
AND from the Lisp world.
It is a (nearly) typeless language: You don't have to declare the type used (as in C) all the time.
It also has some BASIC like functions.
It has a LIST datatype that is useful for declaring taglists (used by many OS functions).
Also C like Macros (#define) are supported
Inline Assembler (68K and PPC) is also part of the language. You don't have to declare specific Assembler sections in your code, but you can mix it up with other E functions !

The compiler is really fast (old EC compiler compiled my 4000 lines of code in less than a second on a blank Amiga 500).
All compilers create fast code, too.

It's well suited for the development of applications (even shared libraries) for AmigaOS (or compatible OS).
You really should have a look at it.

The only disadvantage is the non-availability for other platforms (Win,Mac,*nix).
But if portability is not that important for you (programs utilizing the specific advantages of the OS are in general not that portable...), E is quite a good choice.

The ECX 1.4 compiler seems to have still some bugs; it also only supports the language set of the original E compiler (EC). The additions of the creativE compiler (that is based on EC source) however are not supported.