Re: Ada on Nintendo DS ?

[Micronian Coder <micronian2@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Have you considered looking into RTEMS?
http://wiki.rtems.org/wiki/index.php/RTEMSAda

There is a Nintendo DS BSP (http://wiki.rtems.org/wiki/index.php/Nds) that has support for some low level functions (e.g. LCD access). The Ada compiler for RTEMS was updated quite often last time I tried it (at least 3 years ago). When I experimented with Ada on RTEMS I built a cross compiler for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance on a Slackware Linux machine. Instead of running on real hardware, I ran the binary output in a GBA emulator (I forgot which one, and it wasn't maintained any longer when I found it). I only got as far as printing a Hello World program and translated a C pong game example into Ada that ran very well. There was an issue with exceptions not getting caught, but it looks like that may have been fixed in more recent version of GCC for RTEMS (see http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=35143 )

--Micronian Coder


On Friday, April 27, 2012 11:56:10 AM UTC-7, Natasha Kerensikova wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have been desiring getting a try at developing for embedded platforms
> for a while now.
> 
> Moreover, I just happen to own a device that probably qualifies as
> embedded, with two ARM CPUs (one ARM7 and one ARM9), 4 MB RAM and a few
> DSPs. The device is known as Nintendo DS lite.
> 
> So how do I compile code suitable to run on such a device?
> 
> I haven't been able to find anything that perform such a task, but I
> have missed it?
> 
> As far as I can tell, devkitARM is a toolchain derived from GCC that
> targets my hardware (it seems there is also some libraries to deal with
> DSPs and stuff, but I can care about this later on). On the other end,
> gnatdroid seems to successfully translate Ada code into binary that can
> be fed to ARM CPUs. So unless I'm missing something, there is nothing
> new to discover, I would only need to merge both derivations.
> 
> Would anyone have an estimation or a bound on how difficult it can be?
> 
> I have never built a compiler myself (except gnat-aux ports, but it just
> works, so I have no actual experience of making a compiler code build),
> so I'm not sure exactly how much of a task it is.
> 
> Maybe I should start with smaller steps, like writing C stuff going
> through devkitARM, and then only start aiming at Ada?
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance for your insights,
> Natasha