Sierra 68000 C Compiler

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Asagoth
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Sierra 68000 C Compiler

Post by Asagoth » Tue Oct 24, 2017 8:43 am

This C Cross Compiler was largely used in Mega Drive/ Genesis game development in the early 90's... it was included in the Dev Kit sold by Sega to third Party companies at the time... the SEGA CHANNEL BIOS was programmed with this C Cross Compiler... https://segaretro.org/Sierra_68000_C_Compiler , it was developed by Sierra Systems and released in 1987 ... https://segaretro.org/Sierra_Systems ... is there anyone interested in this here? If so let me know...

Chilly Willy
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Re: Sierra 68000 C Compiler

Post by Chilly Willy » Tue Oct 24, 2017 3:35 pm

Holy crap! They wanted $2000 for that? You could have gotten an Atari ST/TT or an Amiga for less than that price and used a free or cheap C compiler. Even SAS/C wasn't that expensive!

Asagoth
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Re: Sierra 68000 C Compiler

Post by Asagoth » Tue Oct 24, 2017 4:20 pm

Chilly Willy wrote:
Tue Oct 24, 2017 3:35 pm
Holy crap! They wanted $2000 for that? You could have gotten an Atari ST/TT or an Amiga for less than that price and used a free or cheap C compiler. Even SAS/C wasn't that expensive!
They sold also for Unix workstations for around $3.500... in 1995 the DOS version costed $1.750...

Chilly Willy
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Re: Sierra 68000 C Compiler

Post by Chilly Willy » Wed Oct 25, 2017 1:24 am

It's crazy, but it makes a certain sense - it's aimed at businesses where "cheap" is equated as "crap". In the mid-90s, I knew a company that made a video tool they sold on the Amiga for ~$500. They didn't sell too many. Someone advised them to port it to the SGI and charge ten times the price, so they did and sold a butt-load. Crazy managers that figure more expensive MUST be better, and too stupid to actually check if that is the case. :lol:

Asagoth
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Re: Sierra 68000 C Compiler

Post by Asagoth » Wed Oct 25, 2017 9:04 am

There's not much information about the company or the C Compiler in the web... Sierra Systems was possibly just Larry Rosenthal... Western Technologies Inc. expressly recomended this Cross Compiler to be used with their Genesis Development Card http://www.smspower.org/forums/files/se ... nt_785.jpg ... Texas Instruments used it in 2001 in their TI-89 TI-92 calculators http://isa.umh.es/calc/TI/TI89-92SDK/sdk8992pguide.pdf ... it looks that many companies opted to used it instead of other c compilers back then... there was a special link cable sold separately, which provided fast up/down load times (this may be the reason for being the prefered Compiler)... and Sega sold it, as part of his Genesis Dev Kit trough Cross Products https://segaretro.org/Cross_Products as you can see in this 1995 Price List https://segaretro.org/images/e/e6/Cross ... y_1995.pdf ...Currently Larry runs this business https://www.keyringer.com/ ... this is all the information i managed to find about Larry , Sierra Systems and the C Compiler...

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