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2013-05-07 11:44

Krill

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2970

Release id #118713 : Krill's Loader, repository version 146

Please post feature requests, bug reports, questions etc. here.

Highest priority on my to-do list are speed enhancements, anything else you'd like for your next stunning demo?

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2013-05-10 15:27

chatGPZ

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 11364

Quote:

Nothing, if it goes well. But there can easily be all kinds of problems you have to figure out.

welcome to reality - this even applies to shitting into your own pants =)
Quote:

How about on how to not be a complete dick?

you know what - people NOT spoonfeeding every single detail to me and essentially telling me to GTFO when asking equally silly questions is essentially what enabled me to find information and solve this kind of *trivial* problems myself. the scene needs less of that happyfamily BS and more balls for that matter. its 2013. there is google. finding out how to install cygwin and make and perl and ca65 IS NOT HARD AT ALL AND ALL INFO IS RIGHT THERE. whining about it is PURE LAZYNESS.
Quote:

other languages than C have been invented since then.

still C/C++ is pretty dominant and a must-know. much more important than knowing assembly even :)
Quote:

Do you all know your way around the module systems of Perl, Haskell, Python, Ruby, Scheme48, ATS, Scala and SWI-Prolog, just to name a few?

on my box i am running tools which are using perl, python and ruby. i have no clue how any of these languages work. yet making them and the tools work hardly required more effort than installing the respective packages and reading a few lines of instructions.

i feel stupid now for actually ordering, paying and reading "using and porting gcc" when i first encountered it and tried building an sh4 crosscompiler. should have asked in some random webforum instead, i guess :(

2013-05-10 16:32

Oswald

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 5086

To make myself clear.

I have no problem with the fact that Krill releases his loader in this form, it's a nice, perfectly legal solution and I know its my problem if I'll ever have a hard time with it.

Also, I have never even tried to compile it, because there was also someone around who did it (often krill himself).

So, it's just my general assumption on feedback from Clarence (he had his share of trouble with it) and from this thread that its complicated.

2013-05-10 16:38

Dr.j

Registered: Feb 2003
Posts: 277

I can understand Groepaz approach to dive and to discover
everything by yourself but seriously i didn't deal with C compilers for over 10 years (and don't have intetion do it
without a reason ) i tried the "MAKE" program from microsoft and didn't succeed to run the Make command. i ain't a big expert to install comiplers/script systems . i do try the cygwin and i hope i will make it. i think it could be more user friendly for win users ,but in the other hand i appreciate so much Krill great loader. probably the best loader the erea and ofcourse up-to-date with new features

2013-05-10 16:42

lft

Registered: Jul 2007
Posts: 369

Quoting Groepaz

it'll also be very rewarding to have solved a problem entirely by yourself instead of getting it spoon feed by someone else. you may even actually learn something new =P

I agree completely with this. Frustration is an essential part of personal growth; it indicates that you are actually pushing beyond your current abilities. People who actively avoid frustration trade long term skills for short term bliss.

However! Most of the people who have posted in this thread are not asking to be spoonfed. They are venting their frustration, which actually shows that they are tackling the problem. Oswald did ask for a tutorial, but more or less took it back.

2013-05-10 18:19

chatGPZ

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 11364

Quote:

Most of the people who have posted in this thread are not asking to be spoonfed. They are venting their frustration, which actually shows that they are tackling the problem.

and i am actually just doing the same - especially i find it strange to hear certain things from people who i consider very capable coders. call me stupid, but from these i also expect having the skill of installing, and using, something which is essentially a standard toolchain. infact, in 2013, i am seriously asking myself on each of these occasions "how can he still not have cygwin installed?" :)

that said, i was going to post a quick cygwin setup guide now, but realised i havent done it myself for 10 years now (thats when i completely switched to linux) and things probably changed enough that i would get some detail wrong and confuse the heck out of people more than it'd help - so just a hint that you probably will not find so easily in a newbie guide:
- before you install it, search your entire HDs for "cygwin*.dll". if you find such files, they most likely belong to some program you installed that was also built using cygwin. this is somewhat of a problem - you must make *absolutely* sure that under no circumstances more than one cygwin.dll is in your path, or the respective search path of a certain application. if somehow different versions of the dll get mixed up, all hell breaks loose and the programs using the dlls will expose random (and sometimes very weirdo) errors. ("compiler can not create executable", "error 0" -> you are screwed! =P)
- resist the temptation to change the default install location (which is c:\cygwin). yes there is no reason it shouldnt work anywhere else. however, there is enough broken software in the wild that will break one or the other way if its another drive or a path longer than 256 characters are wtf else could possibly go wrong :)

other than that, it really shouldnt be harder than running setup.exe from the cygwin site, selecting a couple of packages (gcc, make, libc, bash, lex, yacc, perl, python ... ymmv) and let setup.exe do its thing (in modern windows you perhaps want to do this systemwide as administrator)

and when its done, get familiar with compiling some stuff.... like pucrunch or acme (should both work with just make and gcc, no other dependancies if i recall correctly).

now to compile a package with more complex dependancies (like krills loader), just do the same - and install missing packages according to the errors you will likely get :)

and now its time to read burglars makefile tutorial =) (and i really mean it - as much of some people seem to think that .bat files work fine for them - once you got the idea of what a makefile does and how to make it do what you need to do, there is no way back. not for you either, promised :=))

2013-05-10 19:18

iAN CooG

Registered: May 2002
Posts: 3187

I don't have cygwin installed. I use MingW/MSYS :P

2013-05-10 19:36

Krill

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2970

Proper documentation and a web-based build service have been on the TO-DO list for a long time now, but i simply had more fun working on the actual product, implementing features and fixing bugs.

Despite no proper documentation and no easy build procedure (but still easy usage once it's there as .prg, i hope), not to speak of any advertisement in form of a web-site or blog posts, i can say this little pet project of mine has been a great success so far.

Many times, i was even positively surprised by new demos using it without me having had any contact with their makers.

Whether an 8-bit demo coder in 2013 needs to know these relatively modern build systems is debateable, and i understand that some people have not been forced to work with them yet.
But compared to 1988, there really is all necessary information at your fingertips, plus many people giving advice, including myself.

2013-05-10 19:51

Krill

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2970

Oh, and about Cygwin, MinGW and Windows itself: The make et al. text-based non-GUI approach is something coming from Unix systems, and those existed long before Windows.
Thanks to Linux (and BSD variants), it has found its way to commodity PCs in our homes, and keeps on being very powerful and usable.

What i want to say is this: These days, Windows is one of many alternatives for home computing, and things like Cygwin or MinGW are actually not a direct loader dependency, but an indirect one, simply because Windows has always worked different than *nix systems in many ways, but is still tweakable fairly easy to comply with those.

In the end, make et al. is one of the most, if not _the_ most portable way to build software.

Most demo sceners seeming to keep sticking to Windows exclusively may be an argument for releasing something like this loader in a Windows-friendly/-only way, but there are many reasons against this, myself using three different OSes on a daily basis probably being the most important one.

2013-05-10 20:09

Cruzer

Registered: Dec 2001
Posts: 1048

I don't have Cygwin either, since I'm on Mac. I have been able to build Krill's loader, and it wasn't as hard as I thought. But now I have the prg's and I wonder what to do with them. I assume you have to jsr install first, and when you wanna load something uncompressed, jsr loadraw. But then the c64 freezes. Also, I don't know how to choose which file to load.

2013-05-10 20:15

Krill

Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2970

Refer to loader/samples/minexample/minexample.s and loader/include/loader.inc. Basically:

jsr install
bcs error
ldx #<filename
ldy #>filename
jsr loadraw
bcs error
[...]
filename: .byte "blipblop", 0; 0-terminated PETSCII string

It's adviseable to check for errors. After each call, carry is clear if all is ok, and set on errors, with the error code in the accu. A list of the error codes can be found in loader/include/diskio.inc.

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