This chapter is a draft. See the outline.

Software development kits for Atari Lynx

An overview of three software development kits to create Atari Lynx games and programs.
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There are three development environments that I know of:

  • Epyx development kit Original Epyx development kit with an Amiga 2000 machine**. Consists of special hardware and Amiga based development tools. This is unavailable to almost everyone and less practical in general.
  • newcc65, lyxass and BLL Consists of newcc65, a fork of the original cc65 for writing 6502 code in C, with an additional compiler for 65(S)C02 assembler lyxass and a library for the Atari Lynx called BLL (Behind Lynx Lines) by Bastian Schick. Bastian has recently started modernizing his tooling which can be found on GitHub here: https://github.com/42Bastian/. In particular the repositories for lyxass, sprpck, new_bll, lynx_hacking are of interest.
  • cc65 The modern compiler suite for multi-targeting 6502-based consoles. cc65 is still in active development and seems the more versatile toolset as it also targets around 20+ other consoles. The source code can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/cc65/cc65. Note: this is a different version from the cc65 that led to newcc65

Setting up cc65

cc65 requires certain environment variables to be set for the C compiler, assembler and linker.

Variable Location
CC65_HOME cc65 root
CC65_INC cc65/include
CA65_INC cc65/asminc
LD65_CFG cc65/cfg
LD65_LIB cc65/lib
LD65_OBJ cc65/obj

Typically, the root or installation location for cc65 is C:\Program Files\cc65 for Windows and /usr/share/cc65 for Linux distributions.

You can set