Basically for something that is "free", the SDS demo
software is really excellent. They have made a company decision
to advertise their product via the demo route and have done a
good job. The 32-bit file access mode difficulty in Windows 3.1.1
during installation and running is the only major problem I have
experienced when using the software. The PowerPC toolset is not
as "user-friendly" as I would like, because of the way
that it has been baulderized to become a "demo", but
still very useable.
Since the starter kit is a "demo" rather than
"full" version, you should be aware of the following
limitations. As far as teaching with 68K and PowerPC
toolset is concerned, these limitations have no real impact.
- Not everything described in the "HELP" files is
available with the 68K and PowerPC simulation programs.
- The 68K "C" compiler will not produce an
assembly code (".s") file from the source
(".c") file. It directly produces the object
(".o") file. However, information about the
assembly code can be obtained in the listing
(".lst") file activated with a compiler option.
- The PowerPC compiler does not like you calling the source
file with a ".cc" extension. Use ".c"
extensions for both "C" and "C++"
code.
- The linker will link together a mximum of 3 object files.
- You can only generate executable/object files of size
less than 68K bytes of code.
- You can't modify the simulator memory model after
you have loaded executable code into the simulator. This
is only a problem with demonstrating laboratory 1 if you
have already demonstrated later tasks and laboratory
experiments.
- The demonstration versions of the Diab Data PowerPC
assembler, compiler and simulator have been made "less flexible" than the
equivalent 68K components. However, nothing very critical
has been removed.
- You are only allowed to place program code within the
bottom 68K of memory.
- You are not allowed to
change the memory specifications when running the
toolset. However, you can set the memory specifications
(to a certain extent) as the toolset "starts
up" with the "sstep.ini" file within the
directory "C:\sds\init". These demo kit
limitations require that Laboratory 2 (which uses a virtual device) be used with a
memory specification model accessing only the bottom 8K
of memory.
- Setting the "sstep.ini" file to allow
only an 8K memory model in Laboratory 2 has some
unpleasant impacts if you switch between
Laboratory 2 and the other tasks. To avoid
complications due to these memory model
restrictions, I have modified all the HVZ
examples to run in the bottom end of memory.
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Last modified: July 12, 1996 05:30 PM by M. Smith. Copyright -- M. R. Smith