Hi everybody,

I'm more than happy to announce the end of our effort to port vbcc/vasm/vlink tools to the TOS platform. Thanks to dedicated work of Frank Wille we've got:

- modern & superb assembler with nearly all devpac directives, i.e. you can finally use your fave assembler under any modern multitasking OS (i.e. FreeMiNT)

- linker with many input and output formats

- fully compliant ANSI C99 compiler that produces hell of optimized code

The whole toolchain was heavily tested on one big project, i.e. we killed quite a many bugs so you should get very well tested product.

As suggested, this toolchain is aimed to be replacement for bloated gcc/gas/ld toolchain which is quite unusable on anything but aranym/ct60. vbcc is lightweight package that runs fine on 4 MB machines, even without FreeMiNT (i.e. under plain TOS!)

Primarily, it's focused to run under FreeMiNT, so I post here little tutorial for the first hello world, in case you're interested in making setup for commandline compiler/assebler under single TOS, feel free to contact me. So, the easiest way to compile "Hello World" under FreeMiNT:

1. go to the website (http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc)
2. download vbcc_bin_mint.tar.gz and vbcc_target_m68k-atarimint.zip
3. directories "bin" and "config" from vbcc_bin_mint.tar.gz copy into /usr/local/vbcc
4. create environment variable called "VBCC" with the value of "/usr/local/vbcc"
5. directory "targets" from vbcc_target_m68k-atarimint.zip copy into /usr/local/vbcc
6. tweak access rights for /usr/local/vbcc/targets/m68k-atarimint/include/* and /usr/local/vbcc/targets/m68k-atarimint/lib/* with "chmod +r+w"

type "vc -o hello hello.c" and you should get Atari ST compatible binary! Please refer to the manual of vasm/vbcc/vlink for advanced usage. You can contact me (see my website) for Atari specific things or Frank in case you fall into some trouble.

What? Did I hear you don't need new C compiler since you're happy with your gcc/g++ but still like the idea of having new assembler? Well, no problem! vasm is able to produce fully compliant a.out mint object files, so you can link vasm output with gcc, yeah! Beat this with devpac!

What again? Maybe you would use the vbcc but the gcc offers cross compilation possibility? Well, vbcc as well! You can produce amiga, elf, atari etc binaries on amiga, linux, freemint, windows etc based machines! No complicated configuration, just run "make TARGET=xxx" on any machine you want!

Hope you'll enjoy it, I was looking for some decent devpac replacement for years and now I got it!