No. There is no development system for Spin or assembler that runs on the Propeller.
You could try running Windows XP under one of the virtualization systems like VMWare and MacOSX. You can easily disable the virtual internet I/O completely, yet copy files back and forth between Windows and the Mac filesystem giving you complete control over Windows' access to the "outside world".
Evanh,
You really have only one choice if you want to do Propeller development with tools supported by Parallax and that's to use Windows XP or Vista. Complaining about it won't change it.
There are a variety of other choices that are not supported by Parallax and that all have various disadvantages and have been mentioned in this thread and elsewhere. All of them require extra work or expense on your part and can't do some things. Tough!
Well, now, there is one artifical wall on that front - paying for bad software that I have no interest in and certainly don't want to give my money to company that makes said bad software .... or "pirating" it.
Evanh,
I take it you will not be posting code for a while then !
You posted in the '...more cogs or ram' thread - 'making the Hub's round robin indexing engine smarter might be in order also.'
Just wondering how you came to this conclusion - without an IDE install on windows ??
Or was it from reading the specs .. in other words did you come accross something that you came to this conclusion ??
Regards,
QuattroRS4
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ 'Necessity is the mother of invention'
Post Edited (QuattroRS4) : 7/28/2007 5:11:22 PM GMT
QuattroRS4 said...
Or was it from reading the specs .. in other words did you come accross something that you came to this conclusion ??
I had a few questions that I search for and got the answers to (forgotten what they were) and read the specs a little also. The fact that that thread was still active was the reason I posted at all. There was more than one conversation I noted covering the number of cycles each Cog has to wait to get access to the Hub. This was of interest to me also.
Your statistics are biased. Since I am mostly a IRIX/Linux user, I browse the web mostly on those two operating systems. However, when I play arround with the prop, I boot my notebook into WindowsXP because until today, I did not have any tools working on Linux to use. So even when I read the blogs, until today, I mostly used WindowsXP when doing anything propeller. Even blogging was a hassle on the Linux side because I would find to be a hassle because I would find attachments that I would want to save and look at, which required Windows. So propeller users are forced into Windows, and therefor statistics about propeller web sites is useless. It's like saying quantanamo inmates like orange because that's all we see them wearing!
Mike Green said...
You really have only one choice if you want to do Propeller development with tools supported by Parallax and that's to use Windows XP or Vista.
Win2k still works too, luckily for me. I don't think my long-in-the-tooth laptop would run XP. Definitely not Vista.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ OS-X: because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows
I am just grateful that Parallax makes the full development suite available for free, even if it requires Winx. A few years ago I attended one of those "<chip number> Day" seminars put on with much fanfare by ..ahem... another company. Yes, they gave you a chip plus a neat little USB programmer for free, then gave you a totally crippled, lamed over development package that you still had to sign over your first - born in the EULA to legally use. The full (read "useable") development package was available of course, for a mere $1400USD. When someone (not me) asked about this, the rep said "Oh, but you can amortize the cost of the IDE over the thousands of products you sell". That may be true if you're putting their chip into a toaster or vacuum cleaner that you are going to make thousands of, but in my job we are lucky to make a dozen of something I design, so this business model just doesn't work. Unfortunately, it does seem to be the model followed by most micro and other programmable chip suppliers. Oh, by the way, their crippled, lamed over development package also required Winx to run.
Beanie2k said...
I am just grateful that Parallax makes the full development suite available for free,..
That's a bit of stupid one. There wouldn't be anyone on the forums if it had a price tag on it. I think you made the very point that was key to charging for a dev kit - It's targeted at mass producers and they really don't care about anyone else.
It's still interesting to note the Propeller's lock-in to Win2k and greater for no apparent reason. Modern windoze compilers should have no problem producing win3.1 executables for apps that don't need anything more.
You don't say? I think I understand now why pleas for cross-platform development solutions are going unanswered by Parallax, and why they might continue to go unanswered.
The reasons for using Win2K/XP/Vista have been stated before in that Microsoft has provided new API calls in Win2K and subsequent versions of Windows and, to provide IDE functionality, Parallax has used these API calls that don't exist in previous Windows versions. Just like the decision to write the Spin compiler in assembly, the decision to support only Win2K and beyond has consequences, but was Parallax's to make and we do have the Propeller and a very servicible (for most customers) compiler/assembler/IDE.
One key point is Unicode wasn't fully implemented before Windows 2000, so there are issues with using the Parallax font. There's also the issue with the API's being seriously outdated. But the number 1 reason is Microsoft itself does not provide any support for systems before Windows 2000, therefore we cannot receive any support for legacy systems we would need to keep around to check for compatibility. It has been nearly a decade since Windows 98, considering complete systems loaded with a modern OS can be had for less than $400, it's not reasonable to expect software providers to maintain backwards compatability with obsolete OS's.
Beanie2k said...
I think I understand now why pleas for cross-platform development solutions are going unanswered...
Well, clearly it goes way beyond any development platforms. This includes all types of application written for windoze. The annoyance you are picking up is that which comes of the lock-in process itself. Forcing people to upgrade then saying "Oh, there is no one left using the previous version - no need to support it any longer..."
I understand the practicalities of these lock-ins so I'll drop the subject now, I know the argument is pointless and will continue being so for future windoze releases also. There is no choice.
Paul Baker (Parallax) said...
complete systems loaded with a modern OS can be had for less than $400, it's not reasonable to expect software providers to maintain backwards compatability with obsolete OS's.
I agree. I have an cheap xp laptop that I use for the propeller ide, this forum, and pictures. It works fine from the first time without fiddling. I don't love it, but it's a tool that works.
Paul Baker (Parallax) said...
complete systems loaded with a modern OS can be had for less than $400, it's not reasonable to expect software providers to maintain backwards compatability with obsolete OS's.
I agree. I have an cheap xp laptop that I use for the propeller ide, this forum, and pictures. It works fine from the first time without fiddling. I don't love it, but it's a tool that works.
I have a cheap PC running Linux. Sometimes I look at it for a couple of days, then I go back to using my main Windows XP machine - because it's a tool that works.
Mind you, over the last couple of weeks I've started getting increasingly interested in Lua and Python - and either of them seem like they'd be fairly good for·developing cross-platform apps. ·
complete systems loaded with a modern OS can be had for less than $400, it's not reasonable to expect software providers to maintain backwards compatability with obsolete OS's.
Well, maybe that's true, but I'd rather spend my $400 discretionary income on Parallax products. It just bugs me that I have to spend money on a product I don't want to use a product I do want.
Paul Baker (Parallax) said...
It has been nearly a decade since Windows 98, considering complete systems loaded with a modern OS can be had for less than $400, it's not reasonable to expect software providers to maintain backwards compatability with obsolete OS's.
From the other side of the fence, from the user's perspective, it can be argued that it is reasonable to expect support for older OS's. Especially when it is possible to write code which runs on the entire 32-bit range of OS's whether obsolete or not, and many vendors do.
It's this opposing viewpoint which keeps causing the issue to re-surface.
It seems to me that Parallax chose to use the latest whiz-bang API and code in assembler and this has dictated what OS has to be used, and fair enough, that's Parallax's decision, but I am at a loss to fully understand why such things were done that way. The Propeller Tool is after all just another IDE and many others run on Win 95 upwards just fine, Spin doesn't seem that incredibly complex that it needs a finely tuned parsing engine written in assembler to do its job on a modern, fast PC. I'll however accept that it can be like working with one hand tied behind one's back to forego the new trickery a latest OS can give to ensure interoperability with older OS's which do not have the same functionality ( as per the Unicode issue ), but one could ask, is it really necessary - would older OS compatibility have been better instead ?
It's a completely moot question now ( no matter how many are asking, no matter how many may think Parallax got it wrong ), because it's a done deal. Unless Parallax change tack, the course is set, and the only realisable option to using the Propeller Tool on Win XP is for people to write their own development tools from the ground-up. If that happens, that is an alternative option for use. Until then, the world is as it is.
I don't see this issue ever going away as many new to the Propeller who expect their older OS to be supported will ask why it isn't. Perhaps we need a sticky or a published explanation which clearly states why Parallax chose how they did, and addresses the questions people do have ? Convince them the decision was rational, reasonable and necessary and people will hopefully be happy and accept Parallax's case.
Unfortunately the it's not unreasonable to expect a user to upgrade their OS, perhaps buy a new motherboard or system ( and all the software they need for that OS ) to use the Propeller doesn't feel satisfactory to me; it has that dictatorial air of you'll use what we decide you'll use, not what you want to use which we are more frequently used to hearing from people who obsolete their OS's with little apparant care for their customers.
Paul Baker (Parallax) said...
But the number 1 reason is Microsoft itself does not provide any support for systems before Windows 2000, therefore we cannot receive any support for legacy systems we would need to keep around to check for compatibility.
I'm afraid I think that's a red-herring. That M$ have obsoleted the OS's does not mean you cannott keep those platforms around for checking compatibility and try to achieve it best you can. I can see no problem with the Propeller Tool being guaranteed for Win XP, Vista and whatever comes with support for others being 'the best we could manage'. As long as the tool runs and necessary functionality is there the end-user can make that call, accept a non-supported version, or use Win XP and get support. As it is, users do not get even that choice.
I once had a staff... bigger than Parallax's... and I can't imagine how they get done what they are doing.
Where's the beef? I'm a Mac guy. If Parallax could trust Apple... and if Apple would come up with the bucks... it could happen. But I really don't care.
The only thing I would really want is a mac loader I can understand well enough to script and a com line out of ImageJ. That for me solves all my problems... then all I would need is a library of binaries and be able to download, configure and run them.
There are guys with the talent looking at it. When the market is there... the products will be there and they won't be free.
I don't fear anything. I'm standing next to the mountain... looking up... and all is well in the Parallax Universe of Possibilities.
The only thing I want Chip to think about is the smoothest, shortest path to his new hardware... everyone else can spit if they want. It won't do anything.
And eventually we will have everything running on a Prop anyway... so what's the worry?
We deeply regret that some of our decisions wrt the Tool have upset some of our customers, but the decisions have been made and we are not likely to revisit them.
We have many things from Parallax: good hard, useful soft, great and helping staff. More than others give. But they do no provide evrything we can hope for (and they don't aim for).
What we have so far:
PropellerTool (winblows)
Gear (winblows)
propasm (java)
hippys' latest creation, the spin/asm disassembler , (winblows)
proploader (Phyton)
my modest pPropellerSim (java)
<everything I don't know of, or I forgot>
Some of these functionalities were not available from Parallax, but the community provided.
We should get over the Propeller Tool not working on Platform X (tm :P) and concentrate in creating/building/designing the tools we want/need.
What they provide works. That is a very strong point, and an useful one.
A Spin compiler is comming, no doubt. More diffciult things were done (gcc for instance), May be is not so nicely integrated as the Propeller Tool, but with for instance, Eclipse and Netbeans available, some plugins can be "easily" created to provide the functionality we want/need. The Information is out there, we have now to gather it in something good/functional/useful and stop weening, that will help as all as a community and will help others to discover the power a well programmed (with nice tools :P)
propeller can deliver.
I too am a Mac user (older graphite colored Imac) who 'wishes' for an all Mac environment. But then I would have to have Microchip also change so I could support some PIC projects.
Of course, there is the Intel iMac which could work. But then that is still Windows with either BootCamp or Parallels or other.
So years ago I got a PC laptop to satisfy the PIC and now Prop needs. Not optimum, but workable. "Windows, grrrrrrrrrrrr!!!" Not a fun machine.
And now am able to enjoy the Propeller. Love that IC, love that chip/Chip.
Comments
You could try running Windows XP under one of the virtualization systems like VMWare and MacOSX. You can easily disable the virtual internet I/O completely, yet copy files back and forth between Windows and the Mac filesystem giving you complete control over Windows' access to the "outside world".
Good point there ... all possible angles covered ..
QuattroRS4
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'Necessity is the mother of invention'
You really have only one choice if you want to do Propeller development with tools supported by Parallax and that's to use Windows XP or Vista. Complaining about it won't change it.
There are a variety of other choices that are not supported by Parallax and that all have various disadvantages and have been mentioned in this thread and elsewhere. All of them require extra work or expense on your part and can't do some things. Tough!
I take it you will not be posting code for a while then !
You posted in the '...more cogs or ram' thread - 'making the Hub's round robin indexing engine smarter might be in order also.'
Just wondering how you came to this conclusion - without an IDE install on windows ??
Or was it from reading the specs .. in other words did you come accross something that you came to this conclusion ??
Regards,
QuattroRS4
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
'Necessity is the mother of invention'
Post Edited (QuattroRS4) : 7/28/2007 5:11:22 PM GMT
- anyhow welcome aboard - a busy first day for you !
QuattroRS4
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
'Necessity is the mother of invention'
6:38 AM Sunday. I should prolly go home and stop the video recorder from running out of disc space.
Your statistics are biased. Since I am mostly a IRIX/Linux user, I browse the web mostly on those two operating systems. However, when I play arround with the prop, I boot my notebook into WindowsXP because until today, I did not have any tools working on Linux to use. So even when I read the blogs, until today, I mostly used WindowsXP when doing anything propeller. Even blogging was a hassle on the Linux side because I would find to be a hassle because I would find attachments that I would want to save and look at, which required Windows. So propeller users are forced into Windows, and therefor statistics about propeller web sites is useless. It's like saying quantanamo inmates like orange because that's all we see them wearing!
Just my 10 bits.
Post Edited (hinv) : 8/6/2007 2:34:33 PM GMT
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OS-X: because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows
links:
My band's website
Our album on the iTunes Music Store
Post Edited (Beanie2k) : 8/6/2007 6:08:05 AM GMT
It's still interesting to note the Propeller's lock-in to Win2k and greater for no apparent reason.
You don't say? I think I understand now why pleas for cross-platform development solutions are going unanswered by Parallax, and why they might continue to go unanswered.
Have fun.
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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Post Edited (Paul Baker (Parallax)) : 8/6/2007 8:11:56 PM GMT
I understand the practicalities of these lock-ins so I'll drop the subject now, I know the argument is pointless and will continue being so for future windoze releases also. There is no choice.
Mind you, over the last couple of weeks I've started getting increasingly interested in Lua and Python - and either of them seem like they'd be fairly good for·developing cross-platform apps.
·
Well, maybe that's true, but I'd rather spend my $400 discretionary income on Parallax products. It just bugs me that I have to spend money on a product I don't want to use a product I do want.
It's this opposing viewpoint which keeps causing the issue to re-surface.
It seems to me that Parallax chose to use the latest whiz-bang API and code in assembler and this has dictated what OS has to be used, and fair enough, that's Parallax's decision, but I am at a loss to fully understand why such things were done that way. The Propeller Tool is after all just another IDE and many others run on Win 95 upwards just fine, Spin doesn't seem that incredibly complex that it needs a finely tuned parsing engine written in assembler to do its job on a modern, fast PC. I'll however accept that it can be like working with one hand tied behind one's back to forego the new trickery a latest OS can give to ensure interoperability with older OS's which do not have the same functionality ( as per the Unicode issue ), but one could ask, is it really necessary - would older OS compatibility have been better instead ?
It's a completely moot question now ( no matter how many are asking, no matter how many may think Parallax got it wrong ), because it's a done deal. Unless Parallax change tack, the course is set, and the only realisable option to using the Propeller Tool on Win XP is for people to write their own development tools from the ground-up. If that happens, that is an alternative option for use. Until then, the world is as it is.
I don't see this issue ever going away as many new to the Propeller who expect their older OS to be supported will ask why it isn't. Perhaps we need a sticky or a published explanation which clearly states why Parallax chose how they did, and addresses the questions people do have ? Convince them the decision was rational, reasonable and necessary and people will hopefully be happy and accept Parallax's case.
Unfortunately the it's not unreasonable to expect a user to upgrade their OS, perhaps buy a new motherboard or system ( and all the software they need for that OS ) to use the Propeller doesn't feel satisfactory to me; it has that dictatorial air of you'll use what we decide you'll use, not what you want to use which we are more frequently used to hearing from people who obsolete their OS's with little apparant care for their customers.
I'm afraid I think that's a red-herring. That M$ have obsoleted the OS's does not mean you cannott keep those platforms around for checking compatibility and try to achieve it best you can. I can see no problem with the Propeller Tool being guaranteed for Win XP, Vista and whatever comes with support for others being 'the best we could manage'. As long as the tool runs and necessary functionality is there the end-user can make that call, accept a non-supported version, or use Win XP and get support. As it is, users do not get even that choice.
Post Edited (hippy) : 8/7/2007 1:10:14 AM GMT
Where's the beef? I'm a Mac guy. If Parallax could trust Apple... and if Apple would come up with the bucks... it could happen. But I really don't care.
The only thing I would really want is a mac loader I can understand well enough to script and a com line out of ImageJ. That for me solves all my problems... then all I would need is a library of binaries and be able to download, configure and run them.
There are guys with the talent looking at it. When the market is there... the products will be there and they won't be free.
I don't fear anything. I'm standing next to the mountain... looking up... and all is well in the Parallax Universe of Possibilities.
The only thing I want Chip to think about is the smoothest, shortest path to his new hardware... everyone else can spit if they want. It won't do anything.
And eventually we will have everything running on a Prop anyway... so what's the worry?
Rich
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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Post Edited (Paul Baker (Parallax)) : 8/7/2007 5:49:19 AM GMT
What we have so far:
PropellerTool (winblows)
Gear (winblows)
propasm (java)
hippys' latest creation, the spin/asm disassembler
proploader (Phyton)
my modest pPropellerSim (java)
<everything I don't know of, or I forgot>
Some of these functionalities were not available from Parallax, but the community provided.
We should get over the Propeller Tool not working on Platform X (tm :P) and concentrate in creating/building/designing the tools we want/need.
What they provide works. That is a very strong point, and an useful one.
A Spin compiler is comming, no doubt. More diffciult things were done (gcc for instance), May be is not so nicely integrated as the Propeller Tool, but with for instance, Eclipse and Netbeans available, some plugins can be "easily" created to provide the functionality we want/need. The Information is out there, we have now to gather it in something good/functional/useful and stop weening, that will help as all as a community and will help others to discover the power a well programmed (with nice tools :P)
propeller can deliver.
I too am a Mac user (older graphite colored Imac) who 'wishes' for an all Mac environment. But then I would have to have Microchip also change so I could support some PIC projects.
Of course, there is the Intel iMac which could work. But then that is still Windows with either BootCamp or Parallels or other.
So years ago I got a PC laptop to satisfy the PIC and now Prop needs. Not optimum, but workable. "Windows, grrrrrrrrrrrr!!!" Not a fun machine.
And now am able to enjoy the Propeller. Love that IC, love that chip/Chip.
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Harley Shanko
h.a.s. designn