StrongARM Ready

by Matt Browne


SA_Ready is an extra programming tool for the Acorn DDE (Desktop Development Environment), as provided with the Acorn C/C++ package, or copies of Desktop C, etc. Unfortunately, if you have neither of these packages, it won't be very useful.

With the advent of StrongARM, Acorn included an extra module into RISC OS 3.7 (called AppPatcher) which scans any AIF program files that are run for potentially problematic code sequences that would cause crashes under StrongARM. Since this is a relatively slow process, Acorn also included support for preventing this from happening: a bit was allocated in the AIF header to indicate that a program is 'StrongARM-ready'. Obviously, this bit should only be set if a program has been tested successfully on a StrongARM!

AIF files are the standard-format Absolute (file type &FF8) files that are created by the DDE linker tool.

SA_Ready is a DDE tool that can be used to denote your programs as 100% ready for StrongARM, resulting in increased performance when loading.

Please note that SA_Ready was designed to be used with Acorn C/C++, and hasn't been tested with earlier versions of the DDE (i.e. Desktop C release 4 and earlier). It will probably work, though.

Using SA_Ready
Numerous files need to be installed before SA_Ready can be used fully. These are described in the Installing text file. An application, !Install, has been provided to complete most of the installation process for you.

The !SA_Ready application can be used like any other DDE tool.

This is the format of the sa_ready command:
	sa_ready <aif_file> [<aif_file2...>]
Any files passed to sa_ready will be marked as being StrongARM-ready. If they can't be opened, or aren't valid AIF files, an error will be reported. More than one file can be passed to sa_ready; in fact, you can process as many files as necessary.

SA_Ready works by setting bit 31 of the word at offset &30 in an AIF file.

Copyright  RISC User magazine 1997
