C68 for MINIX-68K



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The C68 compiler originated on MINIX-ST, the Atari specific version of MINIX-68K (the generic name for the Atari-ST, Amiga and Mac variants of MINIX). If you want to know more about MINIX, then please refer to the MINIX home page

On MINIX-68K based systems you use the C68 program as a replacement for the ACK C compiler provided as standard. You still need to have a CC front-end, a C pre-processor, an assembler and a linker. You can use the ones that are part of the standard MINIX distribution, but the the MINIX 1.5 distribution did include an improved linker.

We no longer run MINIX-ST as our main operating systems, so C68 now gets minimal testing in that environment. However we do test the C68 program very thoroughly as part of the "C68 for QDOS" release, so we are confident that it will still run under any of the MINIX-68K variants.

If you want the source then you can get this from our Compiler source files page and build yourself a version. Do not forget to get the appropriate support routines as well. Note that you cannot use the supplied ACK compiler to build C68 directly - for this you would need either an earlier release of C68 or GNU C.

The reason for this is that the ACK C compiler does not include floating point support (as was the case with all releases of Minix up to 1.5). If you want C68 to include floating point support then you need to go through a boot-strap process where you start by building a version of C68 with no floating point support, and then progressively add capability by changing entries in the configuration file and rebuilding C68 each time. If you need to do this then please read carefully the instructions on how to go about this boot-strap process. You will find that you have to rebuild C68 about 3 times, each time making a small change to the config.h configuration file to add extra capability. At the end you will have a version of C68 with full floating point support.

We no longer use Minix-68K with any regularity, so we are not in a position to provide Minix binaries. Therefore you need to produce your own binaries from the C68 source. This is available from the Compiler source files page. You need to download at least the following components from that page:

The support routines need to be added to your libc.a library. The standard set are always required, and the IEEE ones are required if you want to use floating point in your programs.
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