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Native Developer Kit for AmigaOS 3.9


At last, here is the long promised update to the Native Developer Kit! More
than one year in the making, several changes were made to improve the
robustness and quality of the NDK 3.5, upon which it is based.

What's new, what's different? In part this update is identical to the NDK
3.5, as published on the "Amiga Developer CD 2.1". The example programs are
largely the same, and so are the tutorials and the tools. The 'C' and
assembly header files have been updated, so have the linker libraries, the
Autodocs and the Workbench ARexx interface documentation. New for this
release are the release note files, and the so-called "sfd" files.

The amiga.lib stubs, the clib prototype header files, the pragma header
files and the .fd files are all generated from the "sfd" files. An example
processing tool called "sfd" is included in the "Tools" directory, but you
can also use a 3rd party tool such as "fd2pragma" (by Dirk Stöcker)
instead. Note that the "sfd" files included with this distribution have
been "sanitized" in that proprietary and internal data was omitted.

The 'C' header files were cleaned up and syntax-checked again and now
compile cleanly with SAS/C and GCC, even with all compiler warning messages
enabled. No GCC specific header files are included in this distribution,
but this may change in a future update. As of this writing, the specific
requirements for GCC on the native 68k and on the PowerPC platforms are
still somewhat uncertain. To the best of our knowledge, the compiler
specific header files would have covered the ROM interface, that is, the
pragma header files only. As the "sfd" files are provided with this
distribution, you should be able to rebuild your platform specific header
files yourself, or obtain a set from your compiler vendor.

This NDK update also represents a watershed with regard to the assembly
language header files, which, starting with this release, are no longer
guaranteed to be exactly in sync with their 'C' language counterparts.


Inquiries, bug reports & enhancement requests referring to the NDK 3.9
should be directed to the person who compiled this update and took so long
to finish it: Olaf Barthel.

Thanks go to everybody who contributed to this update, including, but not
limited to Martin Blom, Don Cox, James Jacobs, Gunther Nikl, Alastair M.
Robinson, Matt Sealey, Steven Solie, Martin Steigerwald, Dirk Stöcker and
Neil William!