DICE (Matt Dillon’s C Compiler Environment) was one of the first C compiler I came in touch with back in the days on my A500. Recently,while scanning the Net for a m68k Amiga Cross Compiler solution for my Mac I stumbled across the source code release of DICE by Matt himself…

Here is the story of getting this old pearl running on my Mac…

Building DICE 3.15

• First download the source code and unpack it.
• Apply this patch: dice-rel-3.15-mac.patch.gz

  > cd dice-rel-3.15
  > gunzip -c dice-3.15-mac.patch | patch -p1
  

• Compile the whole stuff:

  > (cd suplib &&make all install)
  > (cd src &&make all install)

• Voliá! All binaries now reside in dice-rel-3.15/ubin

Setup Compiler Environment

There is a simple script called dice.env in the main directory. You can call this to set up your compiler environment automatically. Note that I introduced a new variable DHOME to describe where the compiler resides

> . dice.env

Calling dcc should give you the following

> dcc
DCC 1.12 (24.12.95)
Copyright (c) 1992,1993,1994 Obvious Implementations Corp., Redistribution & Use under DICE-LICENSE.TXT.

Building Amiga OS 1.3 and 2.0 Libs

First you need to copy your Amiga OS C includes (preferably from a Amiga developer CD, like ADCD 2.1) to include/amiga13 or amig20.

> cp -r ADCD_2.1/NDK/NDK_1.3/Includes1.3/include.h/* include/amiga13
> cp -r ADCD_2.1/NDK/NDK_2.0/NDK2.0-4/include/* include/amiga20

Like the README already tells you, now do a:

> cd lib
> export DCCOPTS="-// -1.3"
> dmake -f DMakefile.unix amiga13
> export DCCOPTS="-// -2.0"
> dmake -f DMakefile.unix amiga20

Ok! Libs are now ready…

A simple Test

To test the compiler I took one of the Amiga utility programs supplied with PUAE: transdisk.

The source transdisk.c can be directly downloaded from the repository.

Setup your compiler environment as above, download the source, and the following line does the trick (see doc/dcc.doc for details on the command line switches):

> dcc -mRR transdisk.c

Now a shiny new Amiga binary called transdisk was created in this directory and waits for execution in PUAE or on a real machine…

So much for now… I hope you enjoy your shiny new compiler!