In a very real sense, arent we all in the same war? promotion of our platforms as a viable alternative to Windows.
Aren't we all primarily trying to make an excellent and free OS? Competition among free OSs can only help in becoming better. This goal is worth pursuing independent of what products a certain company in Redmond sells. Actually, both BSD and GNU have started long before the times of Microsoft dominance, and it will be important to continue efforts after the (hopefully soon) date when M$ loses its monopoly.
The PowerPC User Manuals can be ordered from both Motorola and IBM. Two years ago, they had mailed them to me without a charge. And you can download the stuff from chips.ibm.com.
I wouldn't consider PPC assembly being difficult. Actually, learning it was much easier than I had expected. Sure it takes some time to think about all the scheduling issues, but you can gain a whole lot of efficiency. By the way, I was quite surprised about the relatively bad code generated by a commercial C compiler; I wouldn't agree with you in that respect.
I had used the following texts to learn about PPC assembly:
IBM's documentation on PowerPC chips is fairly technical, but I'd recommend it for serious programming. Very useful is the Programming Environment Manual (PEM) which you can download from that address.
There once was a useful document called "PowerPC Compiler Writer's Guide", which was published on www.chips.ibm.com. They seem to have deleted it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you use Python, you might want to have a look at ReportLab, a nice open-source PDF generation library.
Aren't we all primarily trying to make an excellent and free OS? Competition among free OSs can only help in becoming better. This goal is worth pursuing independent of what products a certain company in Redmond sells. Actually, both BSD and GNU have started long before the times of Microsoft dominance, and it will be important to continue efforts after the (hopefully soon) date when M$ loses its monopoly.
The ZX81 Support Page has more info about that machine. See also entries in the Open Directory and the Google Web Directory.
The PowerPC User Manuals can be ordered from both Motorola and IBM. Two years ago, they had mailed them to me without a charge. And you can download the stuff from chips.ibm.com.
I had used the following texts to learn about PPC assembly: