Vestatech

Post edited 4:36 pm – December 21, 2011 by swheeler

While our SBC2000-332 and MC2000-332 computers are still viable products, albeit with an expected remaining product life that makes them less suitable for new product designs, we no longer have good C/C++ development tools for them.

We used to use CrossCode C/C++ in-house for all of our development, but it has a license that's node-locked to a no-longer-reliable Windows 95 system. SDS, who made the CrossCode tools, has been out of business for a number of years. Diab Data, who bought SDS, are also no longer in business. If you follow the purchase chain, you eventually come to a company that no longer sells CrossCode, but can update licenses for it. That would help us, but not our customers who still may need to develop in C.

Looking for other tools, we found that the few commercial tools remaining on the market start at about $5k. That seems expensive, because most of the customers we had who wanted to program in C who weren't willing to spend the $4k-$6k that CrossCode used to cost.

That left the GNU compiler, GCC. The cost was certainly right, and we'd had customers who used it instead of CrossCode for precisely that reason. Unfortunately, every pre-made version we found was configured for Coldfire processors, not the 68K processors. As a result, we ended up compiling a version of GCC tailored to the 68K ourselves. These tools are command-line only, and work under the Cygwin environment. We have not done extensive testing on them, but we have produced a few programs with them successfully. We use them with the ICD32 debugger and USB Multilink BDM interface from P&E Micro.

Because it seems that at least some executables compiled under Cygwin are sensitive to directory structure, we recommend that you unpack the zip file into C:\cygwin\cross\gcc-4.6.0.

You can find the ZIP file here. Be aware that this is a large download (on the order of 113MB).