amiga-sys

Unofficial unsafe bindings for the Amiga (m68k) system libraries.

🎁 🎉 Amiga was released 40 years ago! Happy birthday Amiga! 🎉 🎁

Note: if you want to build high performance games or demos, have a look at amiga-rust.

WARNING: this is an experimental crate built on top of experimental Rust Amiga toolchain

It is likely that Rust programs developed for Amiga will crash or simply refuse to compile, because the Rust toolchain for Amiga is still missing many pieces:

• the LLVM compiler has only experimental support for m68k: it may produce invalid code or crash during compilation
• there's no Rust standard std library for Amiga
• the linking phase uses a custom built gcc linker
• this crate isn't well tested: it may have bugs

If you still want to try this out, then read on..

Features

• direct unsafe bindings to the Amiga system libraries (based on Amiga NDK 3.2R4)
• includes almost all definitions from NDK for Kickstart 1.0 (V30) to 3.2 (V47)
• the bindings are unsafe: it is very easy to write a program which crashes
• no dependency to the Amiga Native Development Kit (NDK): no dependency to the NDK headers or amiga.lib (note: these bindings have been generated from some of the NDK headers)
• supports no_std (no dependency to std or alloc)
• only cross-compiling for Amiga (no building on Amiga)
• extra feature: a lazy developer who doesn't respond quickly to issues or pull requests

Not supported

• no start up code to handle launching programs from Workbench
• functions with variadic arguments: there's always a similar function available without variadic arguments (the replacement function's name usually ends with Args, List or A)
• amiga.lib functions: BeginIO(), CreatePort(), CreateTask(), NewList(), TimeDelay(), etc. These are implemented in amiga-support.
• alib_stdio: functions duplicating libc functionality: printf(), fgetc(), etc.
• debug.lib and ddebug.lib functions: KGetChar(), KPrintF(), DGetChar(), DPrintF(), etc.
• direct access to hardware
• third-party libraries and devices
• no support for AmigaOS 4.0 or other derivatives, PowerPC or other non-m68k Amiga versions

Special cases

• callbacks called by the Amiga libraries have their arguments stored in CPU registers and should return a value in the CPU register d0. It's up to the callback function to use assembly code to access the register values. For an example, see the tester example test_rawdofmt().
• FileInfoBlock and InfoData should be aligned to 4 bytes, but they don't have alignment modifiers, because it would change the size of AnchorPath and AChain. Proper alignment can be achieved by wrapping FileInfoBlock and InfoData: #[repr(C, align(4))] pub struct AlignedFileInfoBlock { data: FileInfoBlock }

Generating the bindings

The crate includes pregenerated bindings. If someone wants to regenerate them, follow these steps. These steps have been tested with nightly-2025-07-06.

• Copy Amiga NDK 3.2R4 to the amiga-sys parent folder, so that it is next to the amiga-sys folder
• cd amiga-sys
• Install bindgen with its requirements.
• Run generate.sh
  • Rust nightly is needed to generate Rust docs, so the generate script downloads nightly-2025-07-06

Building the examples

These steps have been tested on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Prerequisites:

• requires Rust nightly (tested with nightly-2025-07-06)
• requires binaries from vscode-amiga-debug: m68k-amiga-elf-gcc, m68k-amiga-elf-ld, elf2hunk and their related files installed, executables need to be found in PATH.

Building:

cd examples/hello-cli
cargo build --release
elf2hunk target/m68k-bare-metal/release/hello-cli.elf target/m68k-bare-metal/release/hello-cli
# Amiga executable: target/m68k-bare-metal/release/hello-cli

The release build is usually more successful than the debug build.

The .cargo/config.toml file has some configurations. The rust-roolchain.toml file isn't necessary if nightly is the default toolchain.

To build the tester example, follow the steps above by replacing hello-cli with tester.

Typical build errors

• could not compile .. (signal: 5, SIGTRAP: trace/breakpoint trap)
  • solution: fix the compiler
• undefined reference to __mulsi3 or similar functions: the compiler is missing some internal functions ?
• memset, memcpy or similar functions are missing: these errors occur because compiler_builtins hasn't been completed for Amiga ?

Amiga string handling

Often function string parameters are null-terminated. Sometimes they are not null-terminated and the length is given as an extra parameter. Structs mostly use null-terminated strings (STRPTR). Amiga uses the ECMA-94 encoding, which is the same as ISO-8859-1 and Latin1.

Related

• amiga-rust: direct access to hardware
• amiga-debug Visual Studio Code Extension: C/C++ and build tools for Amiga

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or 0BSD license at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.