Beginning with Saturn Dev

[Omni]

Okay, so I decided I'd like to try writing stuff for the Saturn. I'm not sure if this is smart or not, and I don't plan to dedicate huge amounts of time to it, I just thought I'd mess with it for the heck of doing cool things when I feel like doing cool things. Like the good old Atari 800XL.

What exactly do I need? I don't have a big Saturn test environment set up, I just thought I'd code some stuff and test it in emulators. I've read a few of the official documents at Antime's page, and about the SGL. Do I need GCC or another IDE, or simply just download the Saturn compiler and be done with it?

Is there a getting started tutorial or tips you'd recommend? I see the one under Saturn Dev on the sideboard here, and I've looked over it--are those the instructions I should follow? Running Windows XP by the way.

I'm not demanding a sermon, but if you've got any advice or a good way to get started, I'd love to hear it.

 

[ExCyber]

The "Saturn compiler" is GCC, for the most part. it's a custom build but there's nothing terribly special in it that I'm aware of. Basically you just need to build GCC for an sh-coff target, and then use appropriate libs and linker script (both of which come with SGL as I recall).

 

[Omni]

And in terms of hardware...I'm guessing these are basically my choices:

1. Rig a freewing ARPlus-ISACommlink-Parallel thingy

2. Mod the Saturn

3. Use Emulators and Disc Swapping

By the way. Can anyone recommend me a better emulator?

I've got that ...Cassini thing (which works well, since I think it is a re-release of a commerical emulator anyway), Satourne (which, I can't use the CD support becauase I lack WNASPI32.DLL under WinXP, or something), I've got Saturnin, which seems to crash when I run homebrew binaries from other people under Saturn mode, and I've got something called "Giri Giri Debugger", which has a really nice interface but the emulation is horrible and anytime I load a binary it freezes.

 

[ExCyber]

Yes, please ditch Cassini (aka "Let's hack the commercial version of GiriGiri and pretend we wrote it"). I can't recommend any emulator in particular since I don't use Saturn emulators, but I generally hear good things about Satourne.

 

[Omni]

Cool! I found this link for Satourne help...

http://saturn.emulation64.com/emus/satourne/help/help.htm

And now Satourne runs fine. It seems really spiffy.

 

[Runik]

This FAQ is about a version of Satourne which was released in august 2002, it's a really old version ...

On a side note, Fabien is back in business, so a new version of Satourne might pop-up soon

As for Saturnin crashing with binaries, you have to wait the vectors table to be loaded in the saturn memory before loading the binary you want to test ... to do so you just have to start the emulator, wait until the firsts polygons show up, pause the emu, load the binary and then start the emu again. This should work

The alpha versions I made since work a lot better than the last official release, but I don't have plans to do another release soon, sorry

 

[Omni]

Sounds good. Thanks for the info.