cute56 is a Qt based simulator & debugger for DSP 56001 development. Its target audience is mostly myself :) but if you would like to experiment with C/C++ and Motorola DSP 56001 assembler, it might be the right tool for you (without the need of installing Hatari for instance). The main advantage (as I see it) is that when you manage to make a nice multiplatform library for common tasks (setting up the screen, timers, dsp communication, ... ) you can completely forget whether you're targeting the native platform (Atari m68k in my case) or the host.
I'll describe my scenario, if you don't want to mess with m68k at all, you can skip most of it. Also be aware of the fact that you need to compile most of this stuff by yourself, nothing for pussies :) First of all, go to the tools directory and install Win56000.exe. Non-windows users, use Wine for this task. Alternatively, you can use asm56k by Sqward (fixed version by Thorsten Otto here) but you need a minor tweak to calc.asm's macros (src/dst -> \1) and use different command line arguments. For m68k code you need either vasm by Frank Wille or, if you prefer to have your code in C (what I strongly recommend for the initial phase of your project, optimize as the last thing), download Vincent Riviere's great m68k cross tools. Another option is to use Frank's great vbcc but I'm more used to gcc. And finally (not mandatory but it will make your start with this project easier) Qt Creator by The Qt Company. This will provide you also all the needed tools and libraries for compilation of the main project. You're looking for Qt X.Y.Z for ... archive. The minimum required Qt version is 5.4.
I've tested compilation on Arch Linux (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and Windows 7/64-bit, it should work out of the box.
Suppose you've managed to compile and install all the prerequisites. Make sure that PATH contains something like C:\Qt\Qt5.1.0\5.1.0\msvc2012_64_opengl\bin, i.e. the Qt libraries you've just installed (it's not set by default!).
- Go to
tools/lod2p56and openlod2p56.pro. Confirm default build directories and build the release configuration. Copy the output .exe somewhere you can find it. Close the project. - Open cute56.pro in Qt Creator. Confirm default build directories.
- You should see one project and three subprojects:
atari,displayanddsplib. In the bottom left corner you can chooseDebugandReleaseconfigurations, let's stick withDebugfor now. - Edit paths in
atari.proforASM56000,CLDLOD(if needed) andLOD2P56(this one you definitely need to change) and save. - Right click on
dsplib, chooseBuild "dsplib"(subprojects in Qt are incredibly stupid, can't track initial dependencies) - The same for
displayandatari. - Run the program (
display).
You should see a message Failed to load Atari Library, that's fine, we haven't loaded any yet. So go to Modules and choose (from your build directory) calc.p56 as the DSP Binary and libatari.{so,dll} as the Program (in this order). You should see strange colours on the screen. Now you can press F12 (or Debug -> Enable) and voila! You can debug your DSP code with F11. After some iterations you should see how the background color of the screen automatically changes, cool, isn't it. Now if you exit the simulator and run it again, the paths are remembered and the DSP binary will load & run automatically
Right now, everything works for me but be aware of following. If using Windows, asm56k should be compiled against MinGW and not Cygwin (because of dependencies, Unix path handling etc). Not saying it's not possible but it requires to be an advance user.
Trolltech/Nokia/Digia/The Qt Company has developed a nice plugin for Visual Studio which allows you to import qmake's project file and create a solution file out of it and therefore using Visual Studio's debugger directly (of course, you can always attach the debugger to your process from outside but it's less convenient). You can download it for free from the same location as the other Qt stuff. It should work out of the box, with exception of: flags (right click on cute56 -> Properties -> Configuration Properties -> C/C++ -> Advanced -> Compile as and set to Compile as C++ code /TP), dsp.lib linked to display (display -> Properties -> Configuration Properties -> Linker -> Input -> Additional Dependencies) and, should you use/want it, x64 build (BUILD -> Configuration Manager -> Active Solution Platform -> New -> x64). Sometimes you need to (re)set the Qt version, i.e. right click on the solution root -> Change Solution's Qt version and select the one you've installed. I've prepared a solution file for VS2012, if you use an older one, you need to follow the process described above.
So you want to try it in a real emulator. Open a console (oh yeah), go to the atari-build directory, edit the Makefile (if needed) and type make. This should produce atari.tos binary, which you can run in an emulator (Hatari). main.c is quite a mess (a lot of #ifdefs for host/native build) but usually you want to put these things into a library and forget about them. I just didn't want to complicate it more (another project, dependency etc). I guess this could be automated more (and perhaps included in the Qt Creator project) but I was lazy and in rush, blah blah.
Most of the code (everywhere) is just mess, mess, mess. Many things needs to be yet implemented (like writing to memory, labels, different stepping, ...) and many fixed (thread synchronization, crashes on stopping / reloading etc). Feel free to send me a patch but we all known nobody will bother :)
All this stuff is free software, licensed under GPLv3 license. In a nutshell: you don't need to provide source code to your demos developed with this but if you change something in the simulator and/or want to publish the binary, you should publish also the source code. Feel free to drop me an email to miro.kropacek@gmail.com with any questions / improvements / ideas.
Btw, the DSP emulation is based on commit https://github.com/hatari/hatari/commit/a027c905 from June 2009.