Freescale/NXP Codewarrior - Why so many issues with Windows 10?

[AndersJ]

Does anyone know why Codewarrior V6.3 and V4.7
have so much trouble installing and running under Windows 10?

[nctnico]

Windows10 is different in some ways and it may break older applications. One of things that has been changed is the way GUI events are handled. For example: in Windows10 a user interface item may receive events before it is fully initialised.

[MosherIV]

No idea.
What I would suggest is to take every opportunity to tell Freescale/NXP how bad Eclipse is !
Hopefully, if they understand how bad Eclipse IDE is for embedded tools, they will stop using it as the base for their tools and go back to actually developing a decent tool 

[andersm]

Lots of older software weren't exactly developed with best practices in mind. Many also broke with the move to multi-core machines, eg. Renesas' old HEW IDE will just randomly crash unless forced to run on a single core.

[AndersJ]

What I would suggest is to take every opportunity to tell Freescale/NXP how bad Eclipse is !

I downloaded Codewarrior 11, hoping it might work in Windows 10.
* The complexity is huge. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
* It seems to not support HCS12X
* It cannot import legacy HCS08 projects

Nobody from NXP has clarified what is needed for W10.
How can it be a problem to upgrade legacy well functioning tools to Windows 10?

I have a dozen products to support, currently in Windows XP.
XP is getting more and more problematic.
I am trying to upgrade to Windows 10, but it is not easy.

[AndersJ]

Does anyone have contact info to someone inside NXP
or in some other way related to NXP,
that might help me fix this?

[MosherIV]

If this is commercial, start by asking your electronics parts supplier for contact/support information for Freescale/NXP.

If this is hobby stuff, you pretty much limited to support forums on their web sites.

[nctnico]

NXP has a forum on their website which is monitored by their engineers. I think that is the best place to start asking questions. The older Motorola MCUs still sell well AFAIK so it is likely they get some attention. Be warned though that it takes some effort to figure out how the forum works.

[AndersJ]

I have tried their web site and their forum.
I get nowhere.
 
The question is simple, or so I believe.

What do I need to upgrade or purchase,
to continue using legacy Codewarrior tools
V 4.7 (or perhaps an upgrade)
and
V 6.3 (or perhaps an upgrade)
in a Windows 10 environment?

They say that it will not work for this or that reason.
I find it hard to believe their tools do not work in W10.

I must be misunderstanding something,
or asking the wrong questions,
but I cannot figure out what I do wrong.

Help is much appreciated,
AJ

[nctnico]

So NXP says that the old tools don't work under Windows 10 and yet you insist they should? Better listen to NXP if they say the tools are not supported under Windows 10. IMHO you better put energy into setting up a virtual machine with XP or Windows 7.

[AndersJ]

I am not insisting that OLD tools should work.
I do however expect them to support their own cpu
products with tools that work on todays platforms.

[james_s]

I wouldn't bother to support that turd of an OS either, it's not an upgrade. Don't they have a Linux toolchain? These are not consumer products, users are expected to set up a system meeting the requirements of the toolchain, not the other way around.

[nctnico]

I wouldn't bother to support that turd of an OS either, it's not an upgrade. Don't they have a Linux toolchain? These are not consumer products, users are expected to set up a system meeting the requirements of the toolchain, not the other way around.

It seems some versions of Codewarrior support Linux. However I think the toolchains for the older MCUs are Windows only and porting them will take a huge effort. Maybe one way to get around the problems in Codewarrior is to use a vanilla Eclipse-CDT install and have it use the toolchain if the IDE is that part which doesn't work. But this might take some work. A long time ago I wrote a wrapper around the PIC compiler so Eclipse-CDT could feed it the GCC options.

[MosherIV]

If Freescale/NXP will not support old legacy versions of Codewarrior, what version(s) do they support?

Freescale use to be quite generous just to get you to use their devices. I worked on a project where they gave us the MQX RTOS free of charge.

Will they give you a free upgrade to the current supported version?

Very few microcontroller tool chains are available for Linux, let alone supported.
Almost all comercial companies that do microcontroller development will be Windows based, so there is little for the microcontroller companies to gain by developing and supporting Linux development tools.

From what I can gather, hobbiests and Linux fans have cobbled together ARM development tool chain of some kind. Just like Linux based things, it is all command line based and really involved to get it working! Being a commercial, professional embedded systems developer, you can take those Linux tools and keep them. The commercial tools usual work and are easy to use, leaving you to get on with development and NOT trying to get the toolchain to work 

[james_s]

The last several jobs I've had were all Linux based on the development side and the products themselves. The last place I worked that had developers running Windows was Microsoft itself and that was ~15 years ago. Maybe things are different in other parts of the world but Linux is the defacto standard in the tech industry these days, followed by Mac.

[AndersJ]

If Freescale/NXP will not support old legacy versions of Codewarrior, what version(s) do they support?

That is precisely my question to NXP.
What tools do they offer that support the HCS12X and HCS08 microcontrollers on Windows 10?

They still haven't answered that .

[nctnico]

The last several jobs I've had were all Linux based on the development side and the products themselves. The last place I worked that had developers running Windows was Microsoft itself and that was ~15 years ago. Maybe things are different in other parts of the world but Linux is the defacto standard in the tech industry these days, followed by Mac.

Agreed. I'm running Linux as a primary OS for years and all of the software development I do is using Linux (and Eclipse as the IDE).

[MosherIV]

I am a professional embedded or realtime embedded developer, I have been doing this for 25years now. Every company I have been at uses Winodws.
Every microcontroller vendor I have work with (ST, NXP, TI, Microchip, Freescale, Intel, Nvidia and now Infineon) all primarily provide Windows toolchains. Some may support Linux.
Intel are the only vendor that have really good support for Linux but then they are not regarded as a supplier of microcontrollers.

[james_s]

At the last place I worked that did hardware, our products used Broadcom CPUs running Linux and AVR microcontrollers for ancillary tasks, all development was done under Linux. I was not even aware there was so much Windows stuff out there, when I was job hunting a couple years ago the tech job listings wanting Linux knowledge were probably 10:1 vs those wanting Windows knowledge.

[MosherIV]

Sorry AndersJ to take the thread down a Linux/Window debate.
Sorry to james and nctnico.

AndersJ, what volume of parts are we talking?
If it is high (>10,000) then you can mention that you are thinking of switching to STM8, Atmel or PIC, that will worry them and get them to take your (reasonable) question seriously.

[AndersJ]

Not to worry MosherIV.
Linux vs Windows was not a aspect I had considered.
Linux is however not an option until all other possibilities have been discarded.

The volume is definitely > 10K.
I had not considered the blackmail approach either.
I don't like to switch controllers,
but in the long run, if I cannot develop software, it may come to that.

[andersm]

NXP's own instructions for installing "classic" CW on 64-bit Win7 essentially boil down to running it in an XP virtual machine. Have you tried doing that?

[james_s]

Regardless of the OS, if you're going to make >10k of something surely you can set up a dedicated development machine running whatever OS you need, or if you're on a really tight budget run Win7 in a VM? Find the tools you like and then set up a machine specifically for running those tools, it's pretty common practice.

[AndersJ]

NXP's own instructions for installing "classic" CW on 64-bit Win7 essentially boil down to running it in an XP virtual machine. Have you tried doing that?

I made an attempt, and watched a youtube video showing it, but it was a mess.
I gave up.
Perhaps I approached it wrong.
Besides, I prefer W10, and have read somewhere that a virtual XP is not possible in W10.

If this is premature, please point me in the right direction.

[AndersJ]

Find the tools you like and then set up a machine specifically for running those tools, it's pretty common practice.

I do have a XP machine dedicated for these purposes.
I did however hope to eliminate it entirely.
It is slow and awkward,
and has difficulties accessing the fileserver on the local network.
It needs about half a minute to select a few dozen files, for copying.
I read something about XP and SMB no longer working.
Not sure what that means, or if it is related to this.

Perhaps its better to give up,
and make sure I have a couple of XP’s standing by in case of trouble.
It works reasonably well, but it’s irritating that I’m incapable of resolving these issues.

[MosherIV]

Try using Virtualbox from Oracle. If you are using in commercial company, you may have to pay license.

It is a stand alone prgram that wraps the virtual machine.
Virtualbox has a nice intuative user interface.
The virtualisation allows complete control of network interfaces.
It also allows the virtual machine access to the host machines USB port, so you can still use USB devices. You just have to enable the usb in the virtual machine (vm) controls.

Once installed and started, create a new vm, create a disk drive for it (creates a file for the drive image which you can place anywhere on the host filing system) and assign something to boot from eg CD/DVD drive - you need this to install the vm operating system.
Start the vm.
The vm will boot from the boot drive and if it is a WinXP install disk, it will install onto your vm.
Let the WinXP install finish and there you go.
You should be able to boot and shutdown WinXP any time in the vm.
You can even suspend (pause) the vm (do not do it during some disk or usb operation )

[nctnico]

Try using Virtualbox from Oracle. If you are using in commercial company, you may have to pay license.

Not quite correct. You can use virtualbox for free unless you use it to offer virtual hosting services.

[andersm]

If you have Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise, you can also use Microsoft's Hyper-V.

[westfw]

How can it be a problem to upgrade legacy well functioning tools to Windows 10?

It's a HUGE problem, exactly analogous to your "how can it be a problem to support legacy HCS12X and HCS08 projects?"Those old tools aren't upgraded, or even maintained.  They're just "archived."
I'd lay odds that their source code for CW4.7 doesn't even compile with modern windows10 toolchains.  :-( (and if they compile, I'll bet they're rife with bugs of the sort where they assume sizeof(int)=sizeof(void *)=32bits, making it at best problematic to compile for a 64bit environment.)
Are your applications written in C, or assembly?  Isn't the HC08 pretty similar to the HCS08 and the 12X similar to the 12Z?  Can you get by with magic switches to the CW11 tools, or simply "not using" new instructions?  (similar to the way that gcc for 68000 is now sort-of "coldfire minus xxx, minus yyy" ?

[AndersJ]

How can it be a problem to upgrade legacy well functioning tools to Windows 10?

It's a HUGE problem, exactly analogous to your "how can it be a problem to support legacy HCS12X and HCS08 projects?"Those old tools aren't upgraded, or even maintained.  They're just "archived."

I have a handful of applications, larger customer systems,
and smaller tools, all written 20-30 years ago.
They run under Windows 10.
It was not always easy to maintain functionality
with newer OS versions, but I managed, with greater or less effort.

Where there is a will there is often a way.

[Tomorokoshi]

I have CodeWarrior 6.4 targeting ColdFire on a Windows 7 machine. I use the P&E programmer / debugger through USB.

I tried but was unable to get CW 7.0 to work a long time ago.

I will likely get an "upgrade" to Windows 10 in the next few months, so this topic is timely.

The XP computer previous to this was virtualized just in case, although it has been some time since I used it. I don't recall if all the debugging features worked, but neither do I recall them not working.

[nctnico]

IIRC the P&E programmer doesn't always work from a virtual machine using Virtualbox but it has been several years since I have used it. I vaguely recall that it also depended on the machine so the type of USB port may cause problems.

[rsjsouza]

No idea.
What I would suggest is to take every opportunity to tell Freescale/NXP how bad Eclipse is !
Hopefully, if they understand how bad Eclipse IDE is for embedded tools, they will stop using it as the base for their tools and go back to actually developing a decent tool 

You may dislike it, but Eclipse is your best bet in support across many OS versions over the years - we have Eclipse-based software that has survived generations of Windows versions, as well as cross platform (OSX and *nix). Prior to that, the tools used to become quite fragile after the fourth or fifth service pack released by Redmond (2k and XP days) - support for other OSes was not economically viable due to the sheer number of users back then. 

Developing an IDE from the ground up requires an army of developers and testers - for most of the companies the return on investment is quite narrow, especially in these days of "everything must be free". Let alone the reduced number of users in other OSes, which is also quite difficult to accomplish with a full custom design, where companies like IAR, Keil, Segger, Altium and others still didn't make the jump.

[MosherIV]

where companies like IAR, Keil, Segger, Altium and others still didn't make the jump. 

You have listed all the companies that ARE successful because the free Eclipse based tools are so dreadful that companies are prepaired to pay lots just to have something that works and is reliable.

[rsjsouza]

where companies like IAR, Keil, Segger, Altium and others still didn't make the jump. 

You have listed all the companies that ARE successful because the free Eclipse based tools are so dreadful that companies are prepaired to pay lots just to have something that works and is reliable.

Yeah, sure.  Tell that to the number of developers that migrated to their competition due to the lack of multi-platform support.

[nctnico]

Agreed. The vendor provided IDEs generally suck because they are not the vendor's core business. Compared to all the IDEs I have worked with Eclipse is by far the best because it actually helps with navigating through big software projects. And Eclipse also supports more programming languages (think about Python, Lua, VHDL, Verilog) compared to vendor provided microcontroller IDEs so you can have one environment to do everything.

[pgo]

People may be interested in the information available here:

https://community.nxp.com/thread/302974

bye

[westfw]

https://community.nxp.com/thread/302974

Ooh!  Thanks!That looks like just what the OP was looking for.

[tymcgee]

NXP deleted the original post
but now the latest community release of the classic CodeWarrior is here

https://www.cvorg.ece.udel.edu/2021/03/24/how-to-install-codewarrior-6-3-classic-in-windows-10-or-7-

[DiTBho]

Try using Virtualbox from Oracle

VirtualBox is known to have a serious problem with the USB virtualization. If you use a USB-cable (e.g. a Xilinx cable) that needs to changes its USB endpoints when it uploads its internal firmware, then the virtualizer may or may not catch the event, and if doesn't catch the "new USB endpoint", you will loose the connection, you have to unplug, and try it again.

I suggest you a better virtualizer. Xen, or Fusion, or WmWare.

[rsjsouza]

Try using Virtualbox from Oracle

VirtualBox is known to have a serious problem with the USB virtualization. If you use a USB-cable (e.g. a Xilinx cable) that needs to changes its USB endpoints when it upload its internal firmware, then the virtualizer may or may not catch the event, and if doesn't catch the "new USB endpoint", you will loose the connection, you have to unplug, and try it again.

I suggest you a better virtualizer. Xen, or Fusion, or WmWare.

In my experience, VMware is the best tool for USB virtualization. Not 100% perfect, but still the best.

[iMo]

Perhaps OT: I've been using daily Virtualbox in Win10 host running Ubuntu guest. While running iceprog (from icestorm suite) flashing 104kB (ice40UP5k via FT232H) took 165seconds. I got an advice (icestorm github) to mess with the usb settings in Vbox. USB1.1/USB2.0 took 165secs, luckily the USB3.0 gave me useful 15 seconds. The Biggest issue with the Vbox I still see (for many years actually) is the copy/paste from/to host, still crappy.. Otherwise it works pretty good (I used to use vmware in past).

[DiTBho]

FT232H

FTDI chips don't need to upload their firmware, so they don't need to show different USB endpoints.
But chips based on 8051 do need to do so! So, Xilinx and Altera cables show to different USB endpoints.

First, the endpoint required them to receive their firmware, which is send from the host to the chip.
Then they reboot, and they show the final endpint, which is the application endpoint, the one used by the Xilinx program "Impact" to program CPLD and FPGA chips.

[rstofer]

They say that it will not work for this or that reason.
I find it hard to believe their tools do not work in W10.

Why do you find it hard to believe?  Xilinx ISE doesn't run on Win 10 unless you diddle around with some filenames or run it in a sandbox.  Fortunately, changing a few filenames more or less solves the problem but it is not supported by Xilinx.  They suggest the sandbox.

Things changed between Win 7 and Win 10 and some applications don't run.  It's a fact, there's no point in questioning whether it is true.

[Doctorandus_P]

I searched:
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=HCS08
not even realizing it was for the old 68HC08. That's a processor from the '80-ies or so I think?

The first that popped up was an IDE from cosmic. I have no idea about the quality of their tools.
But for that old stuff it seems like a complete revision of the project is in order, especially for > 10k production volumes. Lots of things have progressed in uC land and such an old uC is not quick and may be replaced by a 40ct part. Apparently you use C compiler, and C-code is relatively easy to port to any microcontroller, especially if it's well written and not too heavy on I/O or dependent on special features from a particular microcontroller.

With those old parts the availability of the hardware itself may also become a problem.
I did not read the whole thread, but to me it looks like it's getting time to have a broad view look at the whole project and set out a strategy for it that will work for the next 10+ years.

I myself have a preference to keep things simple.
Just give me a decent C compiler and some header files and startup code.
I really do not like makefiles, but once you've got a project working with GCC and make, you usually have a setup that is relatively stable and reasonably future proof.