
I'm proud to announce version 2.8.0 of CC65, a C crosscompiler /
crossassembler combo for 6502 systems.

CC65 has C and runtime library support for many of the old 6502 machines,
including

  - The Commodore C64, C128 and the C16, C116, Plus/4 machines.
  - The CBM 510 (aka P500), a quite rare Commodore machine (programs
    run in bank 0).
  - The CBM 600/700 family (programs run in bank 1).
  - Newer PET machines (not 2001)
  - The Apple ][ (library support by Kevin Ruland <kevin@rodin.wustl.edu>)
  - The Atari 8 bit machines (thanks to the Atari team: Christian Groessler
    <cpg@aladdin.de>, Mark Keates <markk@dendrite.co.uk>, Freddy Offenga
    <taf_offenga@yahoo.com> and David Lloyd, <dmlloyd@atari-central.com>).
  - GEOS for the C64 and C128 (GEOSLib by Maciej Witkowiak <ytm@elysium.pl>)

The libraries are fairly portable, so creating a version for other 6502s
shouldn't be too much work.


New features in this release are:

  * Linker support for Lunix/o65. Please note that you need the current
    snapshot version of Lunix, or the upcoming version 0.21, which will
    be released some time in the future.

  * conio support for GEOS (by Maciej Witkowiak, <ytm@friko.onet.pl>).
    This means that any program using the conio API will run under GEOS
    with a simple recompile!

  * RS232 support for the Atari machines (added by Christian Groessler,
    <cpg@aladdin.de>). The uip TCP stack including the web server is
    usable with this addition, so you can have your own Atari web server
    with the new version.

  * RS232 support for the C128. This will make uip available for use with
    the C128.

  * Several changes regarding code generation and optimizations:

      - Compares do now generate better code thanks to a hint from Piotr
        Fusik.

      - 65C02 code is back.

      - "Optimize for size" will work again.

  * More flexible character code translation.

  * sscanf is now available. The basic function would also make fscanf
    and friends possible, but the missing ungetc() function prevents
    this. Scanf for files streams will probably be available in the next
    version.

  * Bugfixes and minor improvements as usual.


There is still no support for the following features:

  * Floats and bit fields.

  * stdio file routines on most systems. The 8 bit Ataris are the first
    machines that do have full file I/O support. Please note that the
    complete CBM family doesn't have stdio file support!

  * The 80 column mode on the C128 is not supported by the conio library.


Available packages:

As usual I will provide the complete sources and several binary packages,
including RPMs for RedHat Linux. Linux is the primary development
platform, so the sources do compile out of the box on Linux machines.

Please note that there are separate RPMs for the compiler proper and the
target specific libraries. To develop for one of the predefined target
systems you need the compiler RPM package *and* one of the target machine
packages.

Binaries for DOS and and Windows will follow or may already be available
at the time you read this. OS/2 packages will again be available, but
since there are almost no downloads for OS/2, so the host platform may
get dropped in the near future (again). As with the RPM packages, you
need the package for the development system (Windows, etc.) *and* one or
more of the target machine packages.


Download:

More information information and a download link, please visit the cc65
web page at

     	http://www.cc65.org/


Thanks to all who sent feedback and suggestions and of course to anyone who
helped developing cc65!

