OSDev.org

I have a piece of code that does some bit-fiddling, which should work on Little Endian and Big Endian alike.

Unfortunately the company has shut down the last of the AIX boxes (that I had access to), which were my go-to point to test BE code.

So... how do you test big-endian code? Online compilers like ideone.com are all LE. Emulation? Some small board / box that runs a BE Linux? I'd probably even be willing to shell out a couple of bucks if it gave me a big-endian testbed. One I could use to test heavily C++17-ish code...

I bought for myself iMac g5. openbsd and linux can run on it.
it's even 64 bit. theoretically. with 512MB of RAM.

You could also look into using some ARM based board, as arm still supports both endian conventions.

RaspberryPi draws a blank, as does Arduino...

How about an old SPARC box from eBay? Buy-it-nows for about £50 in UK. You might strike lucky with an auctioned one.

I would start by trying it in QEMU emulating MIPS BE (which is actually the default for MIPS on QEMU; the MIPS little-endian emulation is given as 'mipsel' rather than 'mips').

Another possibility here: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/10/1 ... d-endians/

I think I have completed the circle, coming back home.

I installed WinUAE (which, being the owner of a licensed copy of AmigaForever, I have the ROM and OS files for), downloaded the DICE C compiler, and by putting the bit-fiddling stuff into out-of-context C files, am now able to put the Endian-dependent logic to the actual test.

Not quite what I would have preferred, but a workable solution.

And it feels like it was just yesterday, seeing the Amiga Workbench again...

Actually a good friend of mine happened to have an A3000 in his garage, complete with a SCSI hard drive. (The A3000 being the only Amiga that ever came with a MMU out-of-the-box -- you need the MMU to run a Unix on it.) The beauty is now sitting in my room, pending a test run after almost two decades of inactivity.

If it doesn't work out, the UAE / C solution is good enough for me.

(Auctioned Amigas are anything but cheap. The nostalgics associated with the platform, combined with the scarcity of late-era hardware, made prices go up instead of down over time...)