Hello, m68k! | Devpost

Inspiration

I've wanted to buy an Amiga for years and just recently made the jump. I got an A500 with the 1MB upgrade, but the floppies I needed didn't arrive until 2pm on Friday, just one hour before I left for this hack! I'm really interested in old hardware and tech, but I particularly like how limited they are and it's really cool looking back and browsing bb archives from the 90s/early 2000s of how people have overcome these limitations!

What it does

Don't think there's any way I can glorify this... It prints "Hello, world!" in AmigaShell.

How I built it

It's written in C, which was cross-compiled on a Mac. I can't remember at this point if I used gcc or vbcc to compile it, but they were both horrible. As it turns out, not many people use a compiler on a Mac to target the m68k.

Challenges I ran into

The last time I did C programming was for the original Gameboy's Z80 processor. That path of cross-compilation is much more well trodden, so the dev tools pretty much just work. The m68k cross-compiler on the other hand... I'm still unable to use any more than the base Workbench libraries. I'm not particularly experienced with compilers, after all Javascript is usually my language of choice!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I spent hours trying to get anything to compile, which in the end I did (kind of) manage! If anything else, I managed to copy some cool software to Amiga floppies via null-modem cable.

What I learned

People don't usually try and hack on an Amiga 500 for a reason.

What's next for Hello, m68k!

I'm going to keep working on getting my cross-compilation environment set up, maybe nab a cheap Windows laptop and use one of the various Windows tools floating around. Would quite like to connect it to the Internet (bearing in mind this thing was around before the www!) via the null-modem cable and maybe write a client for some web service. Also would like to write an oldskool demo, but I think there's a mountain of learning to be done before then!

I have so much planned for this!