AmiGemini and GCC

Had a horribly distracted morning again, but just couldn't let this one go.

The final thing on my todo list for my AmiGemini setup was getting a comfortable line length, without excessive window decorations.

Being the odd little duckling that I am. I'm not really a fan of anything more than 10-12 words per screen width of text.

Without excessively large fonts. AmiGemini when in full screen mode therefore is quite uncomfortable for me to read in.

My to-do list item was simple therefore: Implement margins in AmiGemini.

And so began my quest to get cross-compilation working from within WSL2. First stop: bebbo/amiga-gcc (GitHub).

Alas this seemed to be unsuitable for my use case - it was an entirely different compiler that than used by the developer of AmiGemini based on my reading of it's Makefile.

Given this the moment seemed to have come... I had to follow one of the laborious multi-step tutorials for the installation of the current go to compiler for the Amiga: VBCC.

My luck turned however on realizing that bebbo/amiga-gcc actually embeds a VBCC compiler!

An hour of struggling to make any sense whatsoever of the compilation errors it was muttering - "Endianess not declared"! - left me grumpy and disillusioned.

Almost at the end of my wits I decided to make use of the modern toolchain that surrounded me and ignore the embedded VBCC certain that this road would lead nowhere.

Much to my surpise, with a few minor adjustments to the existing 'vc' command line incantations I finally got somewhere, no more header line errors, but linker errors!

Luck again was on my side! They were internal symbols that it couldn't link, not libraries! I quickly tacked on a second .c file to the gcc command line...

And (duh) got more linker errors. My patience quite drained from the earlier battles I took a risk... gcc <misc incantations> *.c... and gcc smiled.

(in reality there was a lengthy sub-battle involving the addition of various IFDEFs as AmiGemini uses some VBCC specifics which GCC can not support)

My battle at end, I finally write to you now, from a full screen AmiGemini with beautiful hardcoded margins (all that for a 1 line hack).

🚀 lypanov

2023-07-01 · 11 months ago · 👍 Ruby_Witch