Code Warrior for hcs08 to improve?

[Wayne]

It seems it would be in Freescale's best interest to get the Metrowerks Codewarrior tools for the hcs08 to work much more efficiently, and to provide timely and useful responses to problem issues submitted by customers. We have been using CodeWarrior tools for the past year and our conclusion is that the time lost with the extermely poor debugger, that it would be to our benefit to move away from using any Freescale processors due to the poor development tools and poor support reponses from Metrowerks. Is there any reason, now that Freescale has acquired Metrowerks, that the situation will improve? Or should we continue our migration to remove any dependency on CodeWarrior development tools, and hence Freescale processors?

[ron]

Wayne
You didn't say but perhaps I can make an assumption about your "thousands of errors".
When I first started using CW it kept giving me "un-defined variable" type errors. I finally realized that the assembler was being sensitive to case (and my source code definatly is not). Go into the assembler configuration panel and find the place where you can instruct the assembler to ignore case.
I'm hoping this will erase some of your errors.
ron

[marc_paquette]

I'm sorry to hear about your negative experiences with CodeWarrior. I understand your concerns. I hope I can help.

Can you be more specific about the problems you are having with CodeWarrior tools? What product and version are you using? Have you submitted any service requests or bug reports? If so, please send them to me directly--use this forum's message feature. I'll look into these issues myself.

Also, in the future, to get a quicker response please post CodeWarrior-related topics to the CodeWarrior forum. I and other members of the DevTech team patrol that forum much more often than the other forums.

Marc.

[rocco]

Thanks for the reply, Marc.

This issue goes back a number of years, so I will have to do some digging up of old emails and service-request numbers. But as I mentioned above, both Freescale and Metrowerks blew us off. I guess we weren't GM.

I will get the history together and send it to you as a PM.

I also apologize that this is in the wrong forum, but I was originally responding to Wayne's thread, and didn't intend to hijack it like I did.

thanks again,
Mark

[ron]

I've been using a third-party assembler (it was freeware, I don't know if it still is) and the "noice" debugger (inexpensive flasher/debugger) for HC08 for some time now.
For HCS08 and HCS12 I use CW exclusively and I can't find anything to complain about (well, it can be a bit cumbersome but its well mannered otherwise). I've yet to find an actual error or bug in the de-bugger.
Since I only write in assembly I use CW in the "absolute-assembly" mode. Its clean works well.
Perhaps you could explain the types of error you've found?
ron

[rocco]

Ron, I can't speak for Wayne, of course, but my problem is that the CodeWarrior assembler simply will not assemble any of our source code. If you try to assemble a file with only a few hundred lines of code, you get THOUSANDS of error messages, all cryptic.

All of this code assembles, links and runs under McuEz, but Freescale or Metrowerks won't support McuEz anymore. I've asked both Freescale and Metrowerks the following questions, and got the following replies:

Q: How do we go about porting source code from McuEz to CW?
A: We don't support McuEz.

Q: What do these specific error messages mean?
A: You have syntax problems in your source code.

Q: What are the syntax differences between CW and McuEz?
A: Sorry, we don't support McuEz.

So we are stuck using McuEz, which precludes us from moving to the HCS08 processors. This has forced us to go to Chipcon (now TI) for our ZigBee projects, which means abandoning our HC08 libraries for those projects (which is a lot of code).

[CrasyCat]

Hello

This is strange as MCUez and CodeWarrior should use basically the same front end.

Are you using CodeWarrior for HC08 V5.0 and are you building an absolute assembly project?
If this is the case, there are some specific settings that you need to do in your project.

If this is not the case, can you please send me some example of such message that I can look at.

Thanks for your cooperation.

[rocco]

Thanks for the reply, CrasyCat.

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CrasyCat wrote:
This is strange as MCUez and CodeWarrior should use basically the same front end.

That is my understanding. I was told that CW was derived from MCUez, yet they are not compatible, and both Freescale and Metrowerks run for cover whenever I mention MCUez.

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Are you using CodeWarrior for HC08 V5.0 and are you building an absolute assembly project?

I do not recall the version, as we last fought this issue a year ago. Our code is written as relocatable assembler.

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If this is not the case, can you please send me some example of such message that I can look at.

We no longer have CW installed anywhere, but I will see if I can attempt this exercise again. Management is pretty sour on CodeWarrior, however.