[Simh] Cross-assemblers, cross-compilers: success! (so far)

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Wed, 2012-07-25 00:05:27 +0200, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons <jg at jordi.guillaumes.name> wrote:
> First of all, thanks for the replies to my post asking for a PDP-11
> cross-assembler for linux/unix environments.
> 
> I've been playing with some of the suggestions I got, and finally I
> have decided to try to build a GNU toolchain configured as
> cross-compiler. Although it has some issues (the most annoying is
> that the default script used by the linker has a syntax error!), it
> can be used and it works. I've also written a small program to
> convert from the a.out format generated by the "ld" linker to the
> "paper tape" format that the SIMH load command expects. 

Which exact binutils version did you build? Current version from the
source code management system? Please tell us where the syntax error
is! That's something that can easily be fixed!

The binary conversion is another thing. It isn't too hard to teach
binutils's `objcopy' to do something like that. That's where I would
start searching to generate some different binary format.

> To cut the story short, I've been able to write, compile, link and
> execute a small "hello world" program over a bare metal (simulated)
> PDP-11. I've written a blog post about that small acomplishment,
> where if you are interested you can see the steps I followed and you
> can find the small utility I've written.

Great :)

> The URL is
> http://ancientbits.blogspot.com.es/2012/07/programming-barebones-pdp11.html

I'll have a look at that; I guess it's an easy fix to the linker
script. And maybe I'll find some time to also bake a simh-papertape
output bfd.  Right now, binutils are building :)

MfG, JBG

-- 
      Jan-Benedict Glaw      jbglaw at lug-owl.de              +49-172-7608481
Signature of: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
the second  :  Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
               by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
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