DICE C Development System (Amiga Computing 85, April 1995)

Since last April, some Amiga developers have been a bit nervous. The reason? SAS decided to drop the Amiga version of SAS/C, effectively removing one of the main development platforms on the machine and leaving users of the system with bugs that will not be removed.

However, all was not quite lost; Matt Dillon’s shareware compiler called DICE was gaining so much support that it was decided to really work on the thing for version 3 to create the ultimate C package. This was no small undertaking and hence the package has moved to the commercial world under the wing of Obvious Implementations Corporation.

It used to be the case that you could only get the commercial package directly from the States, which not too many Europeans were eager to do. It used to be the case, that is, until Fourth Level Developments (the people who do the Mo-miga floptical system amongst other things) took on UK distribution along with a fairly sizeable chunk of Europe for good measure.

With a minimum of persuasion, a review copy was promptly forthcoming from the nice people at Fourth Level and soon five disks and a chunky manual arrived on the desk. Packed onto these disks is a not unimpressive range of stuff, including the compiler, a source level debugger, visual make utility, code profiler, two editors, Commodore Include files for 1.3, 2.0 and 3.0, essential utilities such as enforcer, support utilities and a multitude more. The manual makes a refreshing change too as it is made less daunting by the inclusion of a cartoon on the cover which somehow convinces your eyes that the inch and a bit thickness really isn’t going to be that bad.

DICE is designed to work not only on high end machines with X Gigabytes of memory and more hard drives than you can shake a stick at, but also on a more modest two drive, 1MB system -  it is the maker’s intention to continue this support whilst adding to the features of DICE.

“Enough preamble!” comes the cry from an overworked editor. This can mean only one thing; they want to know what it’s like.