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No offical Zircom Software Development Kit exists and nor has any technical information whatsoever been
provided to the Rex user community. The availability of current addins and development kits is the result
of many hours of work by many dedicated users. A lot of people have made contributions both large and
small to progress to the current position. This note is intended to both provide new developers with a useful
background to the current development position, but also to acknowledge some of the key milestones and
contributions people have made. We've come a long way. Early 2001 There were a number of DataSlim2 (DS2) Addins available that had been produced by Japanese developers. The DataSlim2 (DS2) is almost identical to the Rex 6000 in terms of hardware and much of its firmware, hence many of these DS2 addins sucessfully run on the Rex 6000, though there is no Japanese character support on the Rex so text displays as nonsense. The Japanese are able to produce these addins since the DS2 has an offical SDK available. This SDK was free but requires a commerical C compiler costing circa US $200. 18 March 2001 Mr. Idogawa disassembles one of the only two addins that Xircom released and produces his "Technical Note" on how the Rex displays text. 9 May 2001 Chris Harris releases a "Hello World" Addin for Rex 6000. This feat was achieved by making use of the above technical note and by disassembling existing DS2 addins 30 May 2001 Jory Meltzer sucessfully wraps Small C around Chris' "hello world" to produce a simple "hello world" that compiles from C. 1 June 2001 Henrik Edlund established the developers emailing list. This greatly increased communication between interested developers and facilitated a period of intense progress 3 June 2001 Amiram Stark stuns Rex community by releasing Solirex, coded in assembler and showing how much can be achieved in just 8k 10 June 2001 Myles Rix extends & packages Small C hello world, releasing an SDK that will directly produce finished a rex Addin from C with a single command 13 June 2001 Dimitriy purchases the compiler used by DS2 SDK and makes available via telnet June 2001 Small C kit is further developed with contributions from Waleed Hasan, Jory Metzler, David Riley and Damjan Marion. Othello released as proof of SDK capability. July 2001 Daniel Schmidt, Damjan Marion & Dominic Morris release SDK based on z88dk. Small C development ceased. August 2001 Peter Kong adapts the emulator screen layout & Daniel Schmidt applies it to images of the Rex firmware to produce a Rex emulator
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