z88dk - Version 2.4 Release

[Phillip Stevens]

After nearly two full years, the z88dk team have finally done a new release. The new Version 2.4 release dropped yesterday.

In addition to the usual improvements to targets, this z88dk release introduces a number of toolchain changes to improve the development experience.

Toolchain improvements include z88dk-z80asm supporting local labels and the z88dk-ucpp being able to generate Makefile dependency information.

New targets for this release are the Hector 1 and Hector HR/HRX machines. Additionally, the Rabbit 5000/6000 CPU is now supported.

Significant library improvements include:

• Far heap support for number of targets, allowing access to up to 4 megabytes of memory from sccz80 compiled C programs.
• Optimised file operations for CP/M and MSXDOS1. This speeds up file read and write by using a cache for single byte operations, and avoids the cache where full blocks are being used (eg. copied).
• BiFrost and Nirvana libraries are now available for the classic +zx target
• Improved classic crt0 configurability

The z88dk-z80asm assembler + linker now supports strict modes for each machine type, which will not intelligently support synthetic operations (unlike its usual capability). This is the way most other assemblers operate.

Over the coming months (years?) in later Releases the newlib and classic library targets will be integrated more fully. As part of this work it would be interesting to understand how often the scz180 and hbios targets are used.

Specifically the scz180 target accesses the SD card hardware with drivers directly, and possibly the application can be adequately covered by the hbios target, which uses hbios calls to access hardware more generally (but a bit slower).