Documentation of SDCC is basically a single file, sdccman.pdf, from the zipfile I mentioned above; the same can be seen online at http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/doc/sdccman.html/ (linked to directly from the SDCC homepage).

While chapter 1 is some boring intro and chapter 2 is indeed the configuration/installation stuff (boring enough, too :-) ), from chapter 3 on it is the "real" user manual you might be looking for (with more boring stuff in chapters 8 and 9).



Okay, let's try to come up with some remedy.

I think what I've written in my previous post is a concise enough version of "how to install" (assuming the typical user is Win-oriented - anyway, the Linux folks appear to be used to more complicated ways of doing things :-) ).

So now for the producing useable output etc.

The output hexfile is called sourcefile.ihx - the not-that-standard .ihx extension appears to be one of the major gotchas of SDCC as far as new users are concerned.

Simulation might be a problem. The simulator which comes with SDCC is NOT intended for "human" use (it is used mainly for automated "quality testing" by the development team). There appears to be a convoluted way how to plug it in into a human-usable GUI, called ddd, but that's available only under Linux. Jens Altman's free '51 simulator, jsim claims to support SDCC, but I could not get it working - I did not try very hard, though, I am not really interested in simulations. So, as far as simulation is concerned, you are left with assembler-level simulation in your favourite '51 simulator (jsim is capable to do that, at least), as if you would program in assembler.

Now for downloading to target and running, that's entirely dependent on your target of course... SiLabs, Ramtron Versa, and maybe also others, provide development environment where you can debug SDCC-based applications comfortably, source-level. Note that these are chipmaker-provided tools, so they won't work on *any* '51 - there's a lot of reasons why.

Did this help to clear up the picture a bit?

Jan