Native Developer Kit for AmigaOS 3.9
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At last, here is the long promised update to the Native Developer Kit! More than one year in the making, several changes were made to improve the robustness and quality of the NDK 3.5, upon which it is based.

What's new, what's different? In part this update is identical to the NDK 3.5, as published on the "Amiga Developer CD 2.1". The example programs are largely the same, and so are the tutorials and the tools. The 'C' and assembly header files have been updated, so have the linker libraries, the Autodocs and the Workbench ARexx interface documentation. New for this release are the release note files, and the so-called "sfd" files.

The amiga.lib stubs, the clib prototype header files, the pragma header files and the .fd files are all generated from the "sfd" files. An example processing tool called "sfd" is included in the "Tools" directory, but you can also use a 3rd party tool such as "fd2pragma" (by Dirk Stöcker) instead. Note that the "sfd" files included with this distribution have been "sanitized" in that proprietary and internal data was omitted.

The 'C' header files were cleaned up and syntax-checked again and now compile cleanly with SAS/C and GCC, even with all compiler warning messages enabled. No GCC specific header files are included in this distribution, but this may change in a future update. As of this writing, the specific requirements for GCC on the native 68k and on the PowerPC platforms are still somewhat uncertain. To the best of our knowledge, the compiler specific header files would have covered the ROM interface, that is, the pragma header files only. As the "sfd" files are provided with this distribution, you should be able to rebuild your platform specific header files yourself, or obtain a set from your compiler vendor.

This NDK update also represents a watershed with regard to the assembly language header files, which, starting with this release, are no longer guaranteed to be exactly in sync with their 'C' language counterparts.

Inquiries, bug reports & enhancement requests referring to the NDK 3.9 should be directed to the person who compiled this update and took so long to finish it: Olaf Barthel .

Thanks go to everybody who contributed to this update, including, but not limited to Martin Blom, Don Cox, James Jacobs, Gunther Nikl, Alastair M. Robinson, Matt Sealey, Steven Solie, Martin Steigerwald, Dirk Stöcker and Neil William!