Finally got a response which surprised me as this was my third (?) email over the past year on the same subject:



It's always unfortunate when you encounter a company that does not seem to realize that fostering hobby/enthusiast use does ultimately end up helping to grow your business in some way. Especially confusing for WDC given that they clearly do like to show some support for hobbyists ... just with weird arbitrary walls thrown up.

Oh well.

It does seem as though WDC has backpedaled quite a bit on this. For a long time, the compiler-assembler package was available to anyone who was willing to spend 400 USD to get it. Then the package's price was reduced to around 40 USD and WDC was pushing the heck out of it. Now, they are selling it the same way they are selling their RTL code for building 65xx MPUs in an FPGA. I don't get it. It almost seems as though they are shooting themselves in the foot with this policy change. If nothing else, as you point out, WDC is discouraging hobby experimenters.

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Sounds to me like they might move forward from the current position - they will no doubt be aware of this discussion.

So, I had a tiny bit of a back-and-forth with David. Figured I'd share here. I am cautiously optimistic that at some point in the future there may be some better hobbyist offerings, but I'd guess if there is any forward momentum at all, it will take a long time, and probably consist of a lot of "half-baked" licensing solutions until we finally get to a good spot (if ever). I'd love to be proven wrong though if you're reading this WDC.

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My response:


David's response:


My final reply (no further response)


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And yeah, this is my exact source of confusion. They clearly were willing to sell to hobbyists. Now they are not. I cannot understand why, and I was hoping to get some sort of answer here, but sadly as you can see, I did not. I sincerely hope that David was being genuine when he said he would take my feedback over to his team and see what they could come up with, but given the history surrounding their hobbyist licensing offerings and how they've slowly disappeared over time, I'm worried nothing will materialize.

It is very strange. WDC's business is selling (by various means) 65xxxx hardware. They're not a software house, they can't make a living of selling compilers. The tools are meant to sell the hardware. Which is exactly why, as I already mentioned, Altera provides the tools for free, except for what is at any moment the top-of-the-line (as in: *expensive*) FPGAs. (And that moves all the time - the free version of quartus II now works up to at least the A9, but it didn't when the A9 was introduced).

The other FPGA vendors also provide free tools. Without this FPGAs wouldn't have been the mainstream product it is today, but something pretty obscure used for costly and special stuff (like what we do in-house where I work. That's very.very expensive.) Instead, FPGA is *everywhere*, and lots of people have knowledge about them, they're cheap and easy to study in college (no costs for tools), and those who start studying may already (actually, it's very likely) have worked with FPGAs in projects like Grant Searle's emulator projects, or FleaFPGA, or that Oberon thing, or *thousands* of other projects. The reason it's possible is because of the free tools.

And the WDC compiler isn't even *available*, it's that bad (no, the hyper-constrained toy version doesn't count. We're enthusiasts and hobby folks, but in my hobby I produce code size which is at least as big, sometimes much bigger, than what I do in my day job (I'm a programmer). I looked through the version control history of a couple of my hobby projects yesterday, I've been writing code for one of them since 1998 and I still keep adding code.

Intel provides free compilers for their chips, and they are of very high quality. They used to have a license that would be free for non-commercial use, and non-free for commercial use, but I'm not sure if they even do that separation anymore. In any case, those compilers are freely available for the purposes discussed in this thread. And do I have to mention ARM? Or various MCUs?

If I were WDC I would
a) Provide, for free, absolutely any piece of software or tool that could promote the sale of WDC chips and boards.
b) Open source them as quickly as possible. Parallax, to take an example, moved from closed source to open source some time back. And they rely heavily on c) too. And it *works*. (They did have to ditch some closed source software they had bought from a 3rd party, that turned out to not be a major loss. Replacements were and are produced with the help of the community.)
c) Work with enthusiasts in the community to improve the tools - there are people around with deep knowledge about compilers, for example. We know (from the newsletter) that WDC keeps an eye on, and promotes what e.g. people on this site produces, for example Joe's terminal emulator for the SXB. You're almost where you should be, WDC.. a couple more steps are needed.
(It's not like the WDC tools don't need the help.. there are issues with them, as has been commented on this forum several times.)

Is there any reason to keep e.g. the compiler closed? There are no trade secrets in the 65c02 or 65c816 instruction sets. If there were unknown performance tricks hidden in the WDC compiler (unlikely, but..) then it would be *good* if other compiler authors could use them - they would *improve* 65xxx performance overall, which is never bad for chip sales.
If the 200MHz cores are different in some way, and *have* trade secrets, then by all means reserve that special compiler as a commercial product for those customers. It's not like the hardware is available from Jameco anyway.

-Tor

Messed around with this quite a bit tonight. Here's what I got so far:

The '02 compiler has a 250 line limit, but the '816 compiler has a 750 line limit. The 2K object file limit appears to be a mistake though, it goes higher.

I was able to compile simple programs that could use integer and floating point math. The latter requires the -LMS linker command, and anything beyond integer add/subtract requires -LCS.

It's possible to reduce the size of the header files considerably by removing comments, whitespace, and unneeded functions. But for the life of me I could not get any actual library routines to work. The linker complains about undefined symbols, but it makes no sense, because they are defined in the library file included with -LCS.

I feel there is some merit, especially given the floating-point capabilities. Inline assembly is supported, although I would probably only use it to JSR to stuff that was assembled separately, as to not waste the line count.

Hopefully it will become available again. I could care less about Tide (unless I'm doing laundry haha), but the command line tools are not bad at all, and neither is the documentation for the most part.

Interesting! I think perhaps the unique advantages of WDC's tools are the optimisation (however good that might be) and the simple fact of a C compiler for the 816. Maybe they also have some facilities that really help debug?

I remember purchasing the toolkit when it was $40...but I've lost the binaries. I wonder if they'll replace it since it was a purchased copy...

I had a whole thing written out before X crashed.. ugh!

The assemblers and debugger appear to work without a licence, but commercial use is unclear to me. (Probably need the licence for that?) That wouldn't affect most people though.

The C compiler does have code-size optimizations, and refactoring duplicate code into subroutines, but I'm pretty sure those features are disabled in the trial version.