DPRG mailing list archives: DPRG: Keil Compiler update

Mon Feb 10 13:06:44 CST 1997

I made a break-through on the Keil compiler last night but it seems to
have resulted in both good and bad news.  The good news is, I figured
out a way to install the missing files that the install program doesn't
want to write to the disk.  There is a second install program that will
install a DOS-only version of the tools.  If you install the DOS-only
version, it has most of the missing parts from the Windows version and
you can manually copy over the files that you need including all of the
*.h and *.lib files, the source code for most of the examples, and the
missing binary files for the IDE and tools (probably about 50-60 files
in all that were missing from the original install). Once you do this,
you'll have a complete set of files (I'm basing this on the number of
files that the Eval. version has).  

Now the bad news.  This thing can't be used on Windows NT at all due to
lack of a proper driver for the dongle (it expects to have direct access
to the LPT1 hardware!).  Without the dongle present, it will complain 
that the security device is missing.  With the dongle installed, the
program will try to send data out LPT1 which, of course, ends up in the
print spooler - make sure you take your printer offline or you'll end
up with a 100 sheets of paper with question marks and other random 
characters in the upper left corner every time you attempt a compile! :-(

It also won't run under OS/2 but for a different reason - even if you
instruct OS/2 to give the session LPT1 hardware access, it will die as
soon as a compile is started with a series of about 4 different errors.
It's not at all clear what the IDE is trying to do - it appears that it
is spawning a second windows task that then spawns a seperate DOS task
to run each of the DOS-based tools (compiler, assemblers, linker, etc.).
Something about the way it does this is either highly non-standard or
needs to have the Win-OS/2 session configured in some particular way to
support whatever it's doing.  There is no documentation that I could find
describing what it is the IDE is trying to do and I haven't been able to
quite figure it out yet...

Their web site tech support data base contains references to a problem
similar to the OS/2 problem described above occuring with Windows 95 in
some instances (but not in others!) so I think the only way the Keil
compilers are going to be useful is on an old DOS-based system with a
Windows 3.1 shell.  The other possibility would be to use them under 
OS/2 with some other IDE.  I may trying building a Workframe (the IDE
that comes with the OS/2 Visual Age C++ tools) setup for the Keil tools
if I get time and see if that works.

I don't really want to "downgrade" any of the machines at our office just
to run this, so, if I don't hear back from Keil's tech support guys in the
next day or so, I'll probably just pack up the boxes and let somebody else
give it a shot!

-Steve

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