SDL and SunOS

Chris Hanson cmhanson at eschatologist.net
Sat Jul 21 14:37:01 CDT 2018


On Jul 21, 2018, at 9:29 AM, Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> David Griffith via cctalk wrote:
>> How feasable is it to compile and run SDL for SunOS?  My main reason for doing this is to play Z-machine games on Sparcstations using Frotz (https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/frotz) using the SDL interface to play V6 games
> Under SunOS 4.1.4, the last gcc version that is supported is 3.3.6, but I haven't been able to build it on an IPX;  it gets to the point where it starts running gengtype and eats all memory available (I have 64MB RAM and have added as much as 1024 swap and it still crashes).  So, for the time being I am still at the gcc 2.95.3 level in this particular sun4c machine.  In order to build 2.95.3, I had to bootstrap 2.8.1 using the cc that comes by default in the SunOS 4.1.4 install CD. Under Solaris 2.6, the last supported  gcc version is 4.3.6, which I did manage to build in a sun4m Sparcstation 5 machine with 144MB of RAM.

I was able to build gcc 2.95.3 directly under SunOS 4.1.4 on a SPARCstation 20 with 512MB, it required one tweak to gcc/function.c in that I had to move a # to the first column.

I tried to go up to gcc 3.3. but was similarly unsuccessful. Since I cared most about running code that I built, I considered building a cross-complier on modern Linux that targeted sun4m and using that to build against the headers and libraries copied off the SPARCstation.

Unfortunately I had a really rough time building the tools and could never quite get them working. I suspect that was itself mainly due to the age of the tools I was trying to build; using modern tool binaries to build the last GPLv2 versions of the tools didn’t seem to work out so well. (I’m obligated not to go near the GPLv3 sources, so building anything newer—presuming there even were newer versions that could still target sun4m.)

  -- Chris



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