Using an Amiga Cross-Compile Toolchain

With my changes to the 68000 Relocator Flash project I needed to compile the source code of the flash tool. I could have done this on the Amiga itself, but since I’m developing on my Linux laptop I figured it would be better to setup a cross-compile toolchain for the Amiga on my Linux laptop. This is how it is done.

One of the great things about the Amiga is the community around it. There is a community that is maintaining a modified GCC based toolchain that can cross-compile for 68K Amigas. The GitHub project for it can be found here.

Following the install instructions gets you everything you need installed in /opt/amiga. I then added /opt/amiga/bin to my path so that I can easily access the binaries. Then it is simply a case of writing Makefiles that use m68k-amigaos-gcc as the compiler.

I have made some modifications to the source code for the relocator flash programming software to do the following:

• Identify Kickstart and DiagROM versions for the motherboard, flash and file
• Improve the readability of the general output
• Erase the flash before programming
• Identify the flash ROMs installed
• Other fixes

The source code changes can be found in my GitHub tree in the “Software” directory. And the output now looks like this:

You can see here I’m running fk -i to get the information, it identifies the hardware and states the Kickstart version on the motherboard and the flash ROM. Then I tell it to program a version of Kickstart 3.1 to the flash ROM and it correctly identifies the Kickstart version in this file too. Finally I re-run fk -i and it shows that flash ROM has been programmed with the correct version.

I have more changes to come but it is already starting to look better.