I use Easy68K in my Introductory Computer Organization classes at a big state university. Increasingly, the students are not all using Windows (last fall I had a senior-level class where every single student was using a Mac!), and this makes it tough for a lot of them to have equal treatment and equal ease of preparing assignments. I know that porting something that was probably designed from scratch to be a Windows app would be a big task, but I'd really like to get this on the wish list.

In my advanced computer architecture classes where we study the MIPS architecture, we have abandoned the old SPIM tools in favor of the wonderful Java-based MARS tools from Missouri State. This suite is similar in concept to Easy68K, and runs on any machine the student happens to have. It is a big hassle-remover for faculty. This would be a good model to follow if you decide to do a port.

Thanks for a great tool set,

Justin Harlow
University of South Florida

Users have reported success running EASy68K on Linux with Wine.

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Prof. Kelly

Sorry about reopening this semi-dead thread...

I think this Idea should be looked into more... Linux has a growing marketshare. Easy68k should be accessable to any platform. How about doing a port to wxWidgets. I've been researching it myself for usage in my own code. I run Linux on my main coding machine, but I want to write code that will also compile on a windows box.

Easy68k still doesn't work right on Wine. wxWidgets is used in many successful programs: BitTorrent, Filezilla, Audacity, and one of my favs... Code::Blocks. I'd be interested myself in helping.

So... What's the verdict??

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The Age Old Question: To Be or Not To Be
Finally we have the answer: 2B | !2B = FF

It might be possible to port most of EASy68K to wxWidgets. After just a quick look at wxWidgets I think it would be a very time consuming endeavor. I did not see any way to use wxWidgets in a RAD environment such as VC++ or Borland C++ Builder. I can't imagine trying to write GUI applications without a visual design environment. I just took a quick look so maybe I missed it?

The simulator in EASy68K has several features that are very Windows specific (Full screen code, DirectX sound, etc). Those features might be impossible to support in wxWidgets. The end result would probably require two separate versions of EASy68K, Windows and Other. Two versions to maintain sounds like double my workload which I don't like the sound of.

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Prof. Kelly

I did some more digging on wxWidgets web site and found wxvcl for Borland C++ Builder. I'll play around with it and post my findings later.

I'm not opposed to porting EASy68K, I just don't want to make any more work for myself than necessary. EASy68K is already using up most of my time as is.

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Prof. Kelly

Gotcha...
cool - I'd help some but I haven't really looked at the code long enough to understand it yet. What do you think of wxWidgets tho? I've been learning some of the interface on the side and I'm quite impressed.

_________________
The Age Old Question: To Be or Not To Be
Finally we have the answer: 2B | !2B = FF

----

Seriously, porting sounds like a good idea, but the amount of work involved would likely be enormous. Cross-platform EASy68k would probably be something that would have to be carefully re-designed (though much code could be re-used).

I wish I had time, because I would enjoy the challenge. But, alas, the HW assignments keep on coming.

I think that running under wine on Linux sounds more realistic then porting to other systems.

The most curious thing with wine is that Edit68k works wrong. May be the usage of less complex text controls or separation of assembler from it can solve this problem.

The editor in EASy68K uses a Microsoft Richedit control. Some users have reported running EASy68K under Wine with no issues. Other posts I have read online talk about needing the proper Microsoft Richedit DLL in order to get it to work correctly.

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Prof. Kelly

Sounds like you are making good progress.

Just one comment on changing the user interface. I prefer the current multiple window interface for teaching purposes. Our classroom presentation devices have limited resolution which makes it difficult to use applications that display everything in one window.

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Prof. Kelly

The wxWidgets discussion continues here:
wxWidgets port of EASy68K

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Prof. Kelly

Douglas Goodall sent me the following email and link:

Here is the asm68k with a slight mod to asm.h that allows it
to compile and run on the latest MAC OS X with XCode.

FYI



http://server.goodall.com/pub/development/68000/unix68k.tar

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Prof. Kelly