CC65: New Linker Config files

hawk · Post by **hawk** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:06 pm

An interesting announcement was made by Uz regarding CC65 that has the potential to impact/improve things for VIC-20 programmers. The introduction of multiple linker config files maintained per platform.

The announcement can be found here.

http://www.cc65.org/mailarchive/2009-09/6952.html

So have a think about the various linker config files that you think may be useful to VIC-20 programmers. The 32K one is an obvious one, but maybe also autostart carts. I'm not sure how the crt0.s file will be impacted, as often it also requires changes based on the type of output being generated.

Diddl · Post by **Diddl** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 1:02 am

cc65 is really cool, but it take very much memory for runtime.

Cause Code size CC65 doesn't appears feasible for VIC development. Most VIC user doesn't have a 32K RAM expansion.

But mayby some VIC user buy memory expansion if some CC65 games are available?

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Wed Sep 23, 2009 4:05 am

The runtime grows slowly, so while not really feasible for unexpanded VIC-20, I think with 8K expansion you can get away with using cc65. I have observed the same thing when I begun one of my C projects.

There is another C compiler, Quetzacoatl which supports a smaller subset of the language but may also have a smaller runtime. I found if you use conio instead of stdio and avoid as many library functions as possible, you can shave down cc65 binaries quite a bit as well.

Kweepa · Post by **Kweepa** » Fri Nov 19, 2010 10:16 am

I started to use this on a new game and it's AWESOME.
Hopefully I'll be able to post about the game soon.

Also, it's perfectly possible to use with an unexpanded VIC if you don't use a lot of the runtime functions (printf for example, which adds nearly 2k!). The linker does a good job of only including what you need. Oh, what carlsson said.