• This is a work in progress. *

This is a substantially improved version of the HuC PC Engine C development toolkit. The following features have been added on top of HuC release 3.21:

A. Toolchain features

1. Language support

   • ANSI-style function declarations, including return types and function prototypes (typing is not enforced)
   • struct and union support (adapted from SmallC-85)
   • anonymous structures and "typedef"
   • support for signed and unsigned scalars
   • support initialization of
   • scalars (global, automatic local, and static local)
   • arrays and compound types (constant and variable globals and static locals)
   • constant char pointers with string constants
   • type casting (except struct pointers)
   • void pointers
   • preprocessor features:
   • function-like macros (i.e. macros with arguments)

   • if and #elif directives

   • macro definition in function bodies
   • heap allocator (malloc() / free())
   • C++-style comments
   • support for function calls in argument lists of fastcall functions (e.g. "memcpy(a, b, strlen(b) + 1);")
   • support declaration of fastcall functions through prototypes instead of pragmas
   • labels and "goto"

2. Performance and code size improvements

   • "small stack" and "no recursion" options that cut down code size and improve performance when these features are not needed
   • numerous optimizations of generated code, helper functions, and macros
   • reduction of space wasted in partially filled banks (Artemio Urbina)

3. Quality assurance

   • automated test suite adapted from snes-sdk and extended to more than 470 test cases; supports verification of screen output
   • complete toolchain fixed to work on 64-bit host systems
   • tested and fixed for big-endian and 32-bit systems
   • fixed to work on Mac OS X (tested on PowerPC) and Cygwin
   • more than 70 bugs fixed in various components
   • reformatted all assembler files to make them more readable and maintainable
   • many tools had their code formatting made more consistent and have received uncrustify config files to keep them straight

4. Other enhancements

   • support for more than one input file
   • "library" support that includes C files from the include path
   • default #include paths

   • incasm directive for seamless inclusion of data files in assembler format

     with user-definable page mapping (useful with SimpleTracker and Squirrel)

   • massive reduction of C namespace pollution by assembler libraries; things like "int dx;" don't fail anymore...

Among the limitations that still exist and may cause problems:

• no support for initialization of:
  • variable pointers
  • pointers using array syntax (e.g. "const char *foo = {1, 2, 3};")
  • arrays using string constants (e.g. "const char foo[] = "abc";")
  • variable arrays with unspecified sizes (e.g. "int foo[] = ...")
  • automatic local arrays (static ones work)
• no passing or returning of structures by value (pointers work)
• no type casting to struct pointers
• no floating point support
• no anonymous structs

There are also a couple more absent features that are not so likely to be missed:

• no local union or struct types (not variables)
• sizeof does not permit dereferencing ("sizeof(*a)")
• no bit fields

B. Included libraries

• HuC PSG driver removed except for initialization routine; it was missing the part that, you know, makes sounds...
• "SimpleTracker" PSG driver implemented in C
• added SuperGrafx and Arcade Card libraries by Tomaitheous
• more consistent joypad button defines (as provided by the assembler)

C. Tools

• mod2mml implementation derived from Zeograd's unfinished tool that produces SimpleTracker binary or Squirrel MML files from Protracker MOD files:
  • auto-detection of note length from sample size and pitch
  • automated extraction of custom waveforms from samples
  • partial auto-detection of volume envelopes
  • user-definable mapping of waveform and percussion instruments
  • per-instrument transposition and volume control
• MML compiler from Develo CD
• pceas updated to version 3.22
• pceas symbol table rearranged to allow easier sorting by address
• Develo tool ported to Linux (UNTESTED)

NEW: added 8bpp uncompressed .BMP support