alcinnz
alcinnz boosted
Jani Nikula
@jani@floss.social  ·  activity timestamp yesterday

I wanted to find a small niche hobby coding project that approximately nobody would care about.

I'm tooting about it now, and I don't expect you to care.

I want to use m68k-linux-gnu-as cross-assembler, but it doesn't support the Motorola syntax the original Amiga tools did.

How hard can it be to write a preprocessor that converts vasm mot syntax module compatible assembly to GNU as?!

Turns out, less trivial than I thought.

#Amiga #RetroComputing #m68k#Assembly
Jani Nikula
@jani@floss.social  ·  activity timestamp yesterday

I wanted to find a small niche hobby coding project that approximately nobody would care about.

I'm tooting about it now, and I don't expect you to care.

I want to use m68k-linux-gnu-as cross-assembler, but it doesn't support the Motorola syntax the original Amiga tools did.

How hard can it be to write a preprocessor that converts vasm mot syntax module compatible assembly to GNU as?!

Turns out, less trivial than I thought.

#Amiga #RetroComputing #m68k#Assembly

alcinnz
alcinnz boosted
Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
@jbqueru@floss.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

Me, looking at the 8008/8080/Z80 instruction sets: "bah, why do you need conditional calls and conditional returns when the conditional jumps are already more than enough?"

Me, coding in 68000: "I really with I had conditional calls and conditional returns, relying on conditional jumps makes the code harder to read than necessary."

I am never happy.

#RetroComputing#Assembly
Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
@jbqueru@floss.social  ·  activity timestamp 3 weeks ago

Me, looking at the 8008/8080/Z80 instruction sets: "bah, why do you need conditional calls and conditional returns when the conditional jumps are already more than enough?"

Me, coding in 68000: "I really with I had conditional calls and conditional returns, relying on conditional jumps makes the code harder to read than necessary."

I am never happy.

#RetroComputing#Assembly

alcinnz
alcinnz boosted
Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
@jbqueru@floss.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

In my little world of #RetroComputing, I have stumbled across minor issues in some of the tools that I use.

I've had two cases so far where maintainers very quickly took my suggestion and made it available in their main branch. I've also had one where I haven't heard back from the maintainer, i.e. where I'm going to need to maintain my own fork (for #RiscV compatibility). And that's OK. Beyond being glad that I got help, I'm glad that the original authors allow me also to do the work myself.
Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
@jbqueru@floss.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

A situation that appears more and more, though, is that "with great power comes great responsibility." When using Free Software, you might only have yourself to rely on to maintain the software you use.

Don't get me wrong, most maintainers will go through great lengths to help their users, but that's from being kind and decent human beings, not from being contractually required to.

When using Free Software, it's also "free as in puppy": no upfront cost, but maintainance is on you.
Jean-Baptiste "JBQ" Quéru
@jbqueru@floss.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

In my little world of #RetroComputing, I have stumbled across minor issues in some of the tools that I use.

I've had two cases so far where maintainers very quickly took my suggestion and made it available in their main branch. I've also had one where I haven't heard back from the maintainer, i.e. where I'm going to need to maintain my own fork (for #RiscV compatibility). And that's OK. Beyond being glad that I got help, I'm glad that the original authors allow me also to do the work myself.