1980s/1990s 68k C cross (and not so cross) compilers

[Charlie Carothers]

On 11/21/2015 4:54 AM, Philip Pemberton wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm working on reverse engineering a radio navigation receiver
> (surprisingly not GPS, something else... Datatrak if anyone's heard of
> it) for the purpose of either repurposing the hardware or building up
> some kind of demo rig.
>
> A lot of my effort at the moment seems to be identifying C Library
> functions and naming them. Ideally, I'd like to identify the compiler
> and CLib and feed that into the disassembler to eliminate that work.
>
> Does anyone know which 68000 compilers were available in 1993, and which
> could produce ROM code? Or a few?
>
>
>
> I've looked at Aztec C68K but ruled it out on the basis that the _strlen
> library function doesn't match up -- this is the one from the ROM:
>
> _strlen:
>    movea.l  4(sp), a0
>    move.l   a0, d0
> _strlen_l001:
>    tst.b    (a0+)
>    bne.s    _strlen_l001
>    sub.l    a0, d0
>    not.l    d0
>    rts
>
>
> Aztec is identical up to the bne, then:
>
>    sub.l    d0, a0
>    move.l   a0, d0
>    sub,l    #1, d0
>    rts
>
> Which is one instruction longer... so it's not Aztec.
>
>
> Other parts of the system apparently used VME-bus modules... so this
> wasn't a small operation.
>
> Anyway, whatever compiler this is, it pulls in Motorola's Fast Floating
> Point library.
>
>
> Thanks,
There was also one by an outfit called Microtec or maybe Microtech or 
Microtek that ran on an IBM PC.  There was an accompanying linker 
package.  Mostly I loaded the code into RAM for execution, but I'm 
reasonably sure there was a way to create files to be used to burn 
EPROMs as well.

I can't quite read the title on the currently non-reachable bookshelf 
unless I go round up a pair of binoculars. :-)