Building an AmigaOS Development Environment in 2026

Summary

Tagged as retrocomputing, amiga, gcc, linux Written on 2026-07-20 by Daniel Kochmański Table of Contents Prerequisites Toolchain Emulator Installation Running executables Remote debugging Summary Resources Apropos of nothing, I decided to set up an Amiga development environment. Since figuring things out wasn't straightforward, I wrote down instructions for Linux about how to compile the first program and run it in an emulator. Enjoy! Prerequisites In this post I'm assuming that the reader is a proficient Linux user who can build software from source code and figure out missing dependencies. Standard build tools should be sufficient to get started. Basic understanding of shell commands is also expected. More detailed instructions on how to build the toolchain are available here: https://franke.ms/amiga/amiga-gcc.wiki. Another rather problematic requirement is that to run AmigaOS, you need ROM images (firmware) and workbench disks (installation media). They may be bought from legal sources or dumped from owned hardware. Alternatively one could use the AROS ROM that is shipped with the emulator, although it is known to have worse compatibility with standard Amiga software. Toolchain To build programs for AmigaOS we need the compiler. A popular tool is amiga-gcc. First I tried to use the default (the most battle-tested) GCC branch, but while the produced executable worked, loading the binary in m68k-amigaos-gdb caused a segmentation fault. After some trial and error I reported the issue and the toolchain maintainer, Stefan 'bebbo' Franke, kindly explained that the toolchain now produces DWARF2 debug info and then fixed a bug in embedding debug sections in the final executable. I've finally settled on a branch amiga16.1 for GCC and on a branch amiga-2.46 for binutils (it contains the abovementioned fix). Note that make update may fail due to connection errors. In that case rerun it until everything is downloaded. Both make update and make all may take some time - on my ...