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ray

Little Announcement

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ray    0

hi there people,

 

it has been rather quiet around my jaguar related activities, i am again quite busy with my exams and jobbing, so sorry for that.

first thing ahead, those are great great news about the JagCF board it looks the project is finally getting somewhere, great great work is all i can say!

on the other hand i'm wondering, how's swapd0 work on the jaguar GPU/DSP/68k assembler progressing, i haven't talked to him in a while. he also mentioned he had some (vague) plans for developing a 68k C compiler suiting his assembler package, but if i got him right he said that he wanted to finish JAS completely beforehand and he had some issues with C's typecasting rules because he could not find any info on that. does anyone have some news on that? i also searched the net on building an up-to-date cross 68k gcc for a jaguar target, it should be feasible but it seems that no-one did succeed in doing so yet (a retargeted djgpp as a compiler used in Atari's SDK would be a good option as long as it would still run under windows 2000 >).

just some additional thoughts: i think i'll finally take a look into my compiler building class during the next semester. they talk about a programming language description language + tools called "LiSA" (dunno if anyone has heard about it, but i'm sure it's a very generic thing) and it should be easy to build our own tools (at least an apropriate C compiler + linker to produce jaguar executable 68k code - linking in JAS objects could then hopefully be an option to use DSP/GPU modules from there).

study-related i recently "rediscovered" my enthusiasm for digital signal processing and programming digital signal processors (an rather modern ADSP21065 by analog devices in my case) so i decided to come up with some tools for the Jaguar's more powerful processors, which is what my announcement is about (i'm still working on all of those things, so i hope i will be able to release them soon, but please don't expect too much since as i pointed out already i am rather busy especially at the moment):

-a C math (standard math-lib like) - umm - library ;) supporting 16:16 fixedpoint numbers and standard trigonometric/hyperbolic and transcendent operations invoking the DSP/the GPU

-an <=128 point FFT (so i can directly use the chips internal ROM sine-table) for the DSP which might be an interesting thing for sound synthesis/filtering or just something to experiment a bit etc.

-a fast DCT (probably <256x256 points) for the GPU just for fun as i had great results filtering images in the frequency domain using rather long impulse responses which wouldn't make it a lot (at least realtime applicable) fun when applied in the time domain

 

the latter one is not started yet at all... i have some other ideas like an EZW like image coding sheme to overcome some of BPEGs weaknesses (8x8 DCT artefacts and such).

 

i don't know which of those projects will ever make it to and finally see any daylight, but stay tuned and keep watching my page (http://ray.tscc.de) and feel free to maybe send in some motivation emails encouraging me to make a little comeback since i have so much love for the scene ;)

 

best regards,

ray

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Pocket    0

That's great news to see you alive ! :D

 

I'm really looking forward you Jag projects, I was impressed with your Wolfenstein work. Great stuff !

 

Can we expect to see some of your work on CF when you'll be able to get one ? :P

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Zerosquare    10

That's funny, a few days ago I was just wondering what had happened to you :P

 

Working on coding tools is an excellent idea, I think there are many potential coders on the Jaguar that give up because of the current state of these...

 

And I love the idea of a signal processing library on the Jag :wub:

 

Good luck with your projects and keep in touch ! :)

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swapd0    0
how's swapd0 work on the jaguar GPU/DSP/68k assembler progressing, i haven't talked to him in a while. he also mentioned he had some (vague) plans for developing a 68k C compiler suiting his assembler package, but if i got him right he said that he wanted to finish JAS completely beforehand and he had some issues with C's typecasting rules because he could not find any info on that.

 

Lately i'm a bit lazy... I have some ideas in mind to include into jas, like a "module" directive that will work like namespaces in C++, i wanna include this, because coding my game for Jagcode i had to put labels like gpuFoo, dspFoo, so i think that is better to include them into a module and write something like "moduleName".XXX.

 

About C compiler, I found the info and it works like I thought. When you write an expression is converted to the "bigest" type, and if you assign it to a smaller one, it warns.

 

Hope to code soon, and finish my jagcode game :rolleyes:

 

Also i wanna fix the polygon routine( :angry: ) to continue with the Frontier Project, the 68000 version works, but the GPU one... :angry:

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SebRmv    2

Hello there,

 

good to see you back for a while Ray :)

 

I don't think it is the work of one person to code from scratch a C compiler. The parser itself is really a non trivial task for C language. To convince yourself of that, just have a look at CIL ( http://hal.cs.berkeley.edu/cil/, look at "Who says C is simple" ). A doable thing would be to hack either gcc ( http://gcc.gnu.org ) or lcc ( http://www.cs.princeton.edu/software/lcc/ ) to add a backend for the Jaguar processors. In essence, it is what Brainstorm probably did.

I suspect also that it should be easy to add the support for a new processor to gas (the GNU assembler) but I have not found any documentation yet.

 

Concerning the C type system, this should be not too difficult since C is not a strongly typed language (basically, with casts you can do everything) and there is no type inference.

 

Finally, just note that I have recently added on my website (in download section) a shell script that automates the build of a cross gcc compiler under linux (and probably cygwin) with target m68k-aout. I have tested it on an ubuntu and a mandriva distrib so this should work reasonably.

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