Programming Environment for a Motorola 68000 in Linux

Nick Presta picture Nick Presta · Sep 12, 2009 · Viewed 10.8k times · Source

Greetings all,

I am taking a Structure and Application of Microcomputers course this semester and we're programming with the Motorola 68000 series CPU/board. The course syllabus suggests running something like Easy68K or Teesside Motorola 68000 Assembler/Emulator at home to test our programs.

I told my prof I run x64 Linux and asked what sort of environment I would need to complete my coursework. He said that the easiest environment to use is a Windows XP 32bit VM with one of the two suggested applications installed, however, he doesn't really care what I use as long as I can test what I write at home.

So I'm asking if there exists some sort of emulator or environment for Linux so I can test my code, and what sort of caveats I will run into by writing and testing my code in Linux.
Also, I plan to do my editing in Vim, which probably isn't a problem, but I would like any insight into editors for 68000 assembly, if you have any.

Thanks!

EDIT: Just to clarify - I don't want to install Linux on the board at all - I want to program on my home machine, test the code locally, and then bring it onto the board for grading/running.

Answer

RBerteig picture RBerteig · Sep 12, 2009

The good news is that it does look like there is some interest in making Easy68K more portable, by replacing the Windows GUI with wxWidgets. The bad news is that it is a student's final project for the prof who wrote Easy68K in the first place. See this forum post for the story.

You might try getting his current source kit to build. It may work well enough by now.

GCC has had target support for the 68K family for as long as GCC has existed, IIRC. Of course, the Gnu assembler syntax is wildly different from Motorola's.

Edit: On the subject of editors, any friendly to programmers will do. Code coloring is not all that useful for assembly language, after all. Vim should be just fine... I wrote a lot of assembly in vi back in the day.