On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 03:24:04PM -0700, Randy Grafton wrote:

> I am trying to learn assembly programming on the M68K family. I
> thought that getting an old Quadra 800 with NetBSD would be the way to
> go. Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time verifying that an
> assembler/compiler comes with this distribution that will let me tap
> in to the full capability of the M68K architecture. Does this distro
> come with the tools to help develop this skill and if so what are
> they? Thanks for your assistance!

the tools are as (AKA gas), gcc, ld, and the binutils.  they are
installed from the comp.tgz tarball.  if gcc exists on your system, you
have the tools for doing m68k assembly.

one problem I've found is that there is a huge hole between the gnu
assembler documentation and motorola documentation.  you pretty much
have to wade around with both, study disassemblies, pre-existing
assembly code, and the output of gcc -S before things start to make any
sense.  :)  I have yet to find any straight forward documentation on
"m68k assembly programming with GNU assembler."  it's all in the gas
documentation, but it's completely obtuse.

gas accepts both motorola and MIT m68k syntaxes, and even the gnu tools
aren't consistent.  for instance, objdump -S produces different syntax
than gcc -S.

you can make it work...  the steps just aren't clearly documented.  :)

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier@poofygoof.com