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Mission Statment: This site was created for the sole purpose of pushing towards a means of getting a workable version of Free Pascal that supports compiling for the GameBoy Advance platform and as a collaboration point of the information and work that has already been collected and put together. The files listed below are all meant to be free for use and are currerntly here in a work-in-progress format. All works have been authorized for such use and released of any restrictions that prevent us from getting a workable version of the Free Pascal compiler (aka FPC). Contributions are always welcomed and those that take part in the initiative also ask that if you do make any progress towards a compilable copy that you would be kind enough to share your finding with us so that we can post it here. |
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Last Site Update: December 26th, 2006 | ![]() |
| FPC 4 GBA Project Site | Francesco's knick-knacks Site (RSS Feed) | |
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Hello there! I have just uploaded the new fpc stable release 2.2.4a, for GBA and NDS. Because some bug fixes added in the development trunk that arent merged to 2.2.4 branch, a couple of new features are postponed to the next release. But don't worry, all should work fine without them =)So, let's talk a bit about this release! I have added a batch script to auto configure the fpc.cfg file, so it should be easier to install the compiler. Now there are several new examples and, among others, I'm sure you will find interesting the ones about sprites and background, as well as the ones about music and effects. I'm a bit lazy, you know, so at this time no screenshots, sorry =P So, after a few months I'm coming back here. I was busy with my new job and I had some hard times too, but things are going better now. Let see, there are some good and bad news to show. First of all, maybe you have noticed that there is a new devkitPro and libnds version, so I'm spending my vacations to update fpc4nds and libndsfpc. There are a lot of changes to do and something does not work yet as expected. On the other hand, some old bugs have been fixed. I'm working now on a mechanism that should allow accessing files in the pascal way (assign, reset, rewrite, read, write, close, ...).In the next release it will be an audio library too, maxmod, that is a way better than older libs that where shipped in the past with libnds. About the book: because some heavy changes in the library interface, I need to rewrite some parts here and there, but my main problem is the lack of time because my new job, so don't expect anything soon. Some months ago I wrote a post on PGD forum about a book I started to write. Telling long story short, I'm writing a book about Nintendo DS programming with Free Pascal compiler ^_^.I have spent my vacation to write down some other stuff and to reorganize the book, correct mistakes, write examples and so on. At this time I'm writing in Italian, but an English translation is already planned. My intention is to make it available for free as ebook and, maybe, sell it as paper book at Lulu.com for a little fee. A zip archive with all tools and examples will be available here too and, maybe, i'll enclose a CD to the book too. The work slowly goes on, but I hope to release it as soon as possible. In the next days I'll put online a new section to show the work in progress percentage. As I promised, there is a new tool available for download: bin2unit. It's another binary-to-code (pascal and/or asm) converter, use it if you want. You will find a dedicated section on the left menu =)About other things: I'm a bit busy now, because real life every so often knocks to my door to remember that it's still there, so don't expect any update soon. Though I have almost finished a visual tool to view and change nds roms header (yeah, you know, things like icon, title, publisher and so on) but, as I have said, I can't find some spare time to complete it. I have passed the last few days working on fpc4gba in order to reflect the latest updates on devkitARM for gba. I have modified the examples and the libgba, because this is a job I should had to do months ago, but I never had the time to do. About fpc4nds, I'm working on the memory manager (again... *_*): Sergio, a cool guy that is working with fpc4nds, has discovered a bug on the memory manager and has shared some nice ideas in order to fix it. He has proposed some fixes and ideas about file and console I/O in order to make fpc4nds more pascal compliant. We are working on it now, so stay tuned. A last word about a command line tool I have made: it is a converter that takes a list of binary files as parameter and exports them in a single pascal unit or in a pascal unit + asm files (for relocating purposes). I'm improving it now (I'm thinking about loading templates, in order to implement other languages) and I'm just too lazy to upload it now, but stay tuned, because I'll release it soon . Oh, by the way, its eccentric name is bin2units... |
