To cross develop or not - was Re: eBay WTH?

heuser.marcus@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 21, 1:49 am, "Terry Olsen" <tolse...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I now use my PC for development (faster and more
comfortable) and the finished product (if it gets finished ;-)
will run well on a 1 MHz machine (that's the one parameter that
is definitely fixed).
Do you develop in an emulator or do you use a cross compiler?

Right now I'm in the spreadsheet of OpenOffice ;-)

You see, I'm not yet in the implementation phase so I've not
decided on this, yet. It's a large game project and I want to
create lots of content first so that I know what I have to write.

Generating *good* content is in my experience much harder than
the actual programming. It won't be a programming sensations like
David's raycaster, anyway, so I'm pretty confident that I can pull
it off. Also I'm not inclined to program lots of code and then
realize that I'm on a completely wrong path. Michael's waste basket
isn't for the code - it's for the ideas ;-)

In the past I always lost interest because I didn't have enough
stuff to make it "live". This time it's the other way round and
I'm going slowly but steadily forward.

I think I would like to use AppleWin but it's fullscreen mode is
broken (at least in the debugger) and the normal screen size is
too tiny for development.

What do you use to develop for A2 on a PC?

Assembler (I would like to use Merlin because I know and like it
but I think that a cross assembler may be the way I'll have to go)
and Applesoft (mostly for the editors and other tools).

This is what I know good enough and I won't learn a new language
for a single project.
It seems that I have to create some sort of simple scripting
language just to save memory but I this isn't really comparable.

For most of the graphics I think "8-16 Paint" (the 8 bit variant)
will be sufficient.

You can see that I'm still right at the start and can't give you a
"code finished" percentage yet but I'm determined.
And no - I won't give any details regarding the content ;-)

bye
Marcus

Hi Marcus-

I was in a similar situation with my raycaster. Initially I wanted to do everything on the A2, but I soon realized that time was limited and the process needed to be as streamlined as possible. I need a modern multi-file/multi-window editor to be efficient (80x24 just doesn't cut it). The biggest time saver for me ended up having an emulation environment that could start up quickly and load the binary I had just build with the cc65 toolchain. Having the ability to break into the emulator and check memory values and insert watchpoints/breakpoints was crucial. Since I use a Mac, Virtual ][ was not just the obvious choice, it was a godsend. No source code level debugging here! Full screen wasn't an issue as I generally needed to have the source code windows up next to the emulator. Transferring everything over to real hardware once in a while is important to ensure the feel and look is right.

For content creation, I wrote tools in AppleSoft and ran the emulator at full speed. It made for pretty quick development inside the environment the content would be seen in. My content was pretty minimal though.

Good luck!

Dave...
.

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