FPC 4 GBA: Awaiting THUMB for ARM7 & ARM9

[WILL]

Well basic support is now available for GBA using only ARM code, but now how about those very useful THUMB instructions that are needed to output some more optimized code for both the GBA and DS hardware?

The unfortunate thing about ARM instructions only is that it's gonna run like crap on your actual hardware unit. It's just the way that the system was built.

If I have time I may look up more on these instructions and present what I can to the FPC team or Florian himself. But in the meantime they are working on floating point emulation.

[Sly]

How are things looking on this front, WILL? I'm curious because it would also be of assistance to getting things running on the GP2x since it is running two ARM9TDMI CPUs. I'm still not 100% sure which would be faster on the GP2x (32-bit ARM instructions or the 16-bit THUMB instructions), but it will be nice to have the choice.

[Marco V]

How are things looking on this front, WILL? I'm curious because it would also be of assistance to getting things running on the GP2x since it is running two ARM9TDMI CPUs. I'm still not 100% sure which would be faster on the GP2x (32-bit ARM instructions or the 16-bit THUMB instructions), but it will be nice to have the choice.

It could be that recents 2.1.1's have thumb. I heard fpk mumble about it a week or two ago

[Sly]

How do you compile ppcarm.exe from the FPC sources to cross-compile ARM elfs on a Win32 machine? I've read buildfaq.pdf, but still cannot work out how to do it.

[Legolas]

How do you compile ppcarm.exe from the FPC sources to cross-compile ARM elfs on a Win32 machine? I've read buildfaq.pdf, but still cannot work out how to do it.

"make PPC_TARGET=arm" on fpc/source/compiler directory

[Sly]

Thanks. How do you find all those options? Are they documented somewhere that I haven't found yet?

[Legolas]

Thanks. How do you find all those options? Are they documented somewhere that I haven't found yet?

IIRC (we talked about that on FPC4GBA main thread) these infos come from an IRC chat session between WILL and FPK and are undocumented. BTW you can try to look at makefile and makefile.fpc in compiler sources directory.

[marmin]

Is there a clear and good tutorial as to how programming gba with FPC. How is the graphics system , etc

[Legolas]

Is there a clear and good tutorial as to how programming gba with FPC. How is the graphics system , etc

Still does not exist a full functional fpc compiler for gba, so no tutorial available, sorry.

[marmin]

So if there's no functional compiler available, and no tutorial, -
how do you guys and girls know how to program it?