ARM vs. Intel

[Mikemk]

I am currently trying to make a tablet os, and my target device runs an arm processor. The os is near the end of the bootloader stage. My question is, since my goal is an arm processor, should i quit intel and just go straight to arm, or work on an intel version for the experience, then rewrite it for arm?
The reason I'm asking is, intel OSs have a ton of documentation, while arm has very little, but if I go straight to arm, it will be a lot less work to translate it to arm, since it already would be.

If you think arm is better, can you point me toward some resources? (Assembler, emulator, documentation, perhaps a way to pull the hardware specs off an android rom since there is no detection method...)

[iansjack]

Plenty of documentation here: http://infocenter.arm.com

As for development tools, just use a gcc cross compiler on Linux. Qemu emulates certain ARM boards and there is an emulator in the Android SDK (although I don't know whether you could use this for software other than Android). Or you can always buy the real thing as a Raspberry Pi (costs only a few tens of dollars).

If you are set on writing for an ARM processor I can't see any point in starting with an x86.

[Mikemk]

OK thank you. And the emulator in the android sdk really isn't a emulator. It's more of a cross between an emulator and an android simulator. Am I correct in assuming that nasm cannot output for arm? I much prefer assembly to c/c++

[OSwhatever]

The GCC assembler can output ARM code if you have compiled it to output ARM code, or you can get codesourcery binaries for ARM.