Does the presence of a file indicate a "supported" MCU in the IDE?

Hello,

You are probably not going to like reading this, but I am playing with an old AT90S8515 MCU.
I have it working somewhat in the 1.6.5 IDE.

There is an io8515.h file for it as part of the package and it is also supported in avrdude.conf

Does that make it a "supported" MCU?

To explain the reason for my query, I am currently stuck at compiling with Serial support, so that I can monitor the output to the COM port it is connected to.

Is it even possible without extensive work to enable Serial for this chip?

Thank you very much for any pointers.

Is this a question for the Arduino Team or just a community question in general?

The answer to the question "if the MCU is supported by Arduino" is a very large NO as there are no boards with that.

If the question is "could the Arduino AVR core be ported to this MCU" the answer is yes. "Extensive work" depends on your experience of AVR and the Arduino/Wiring source code.

Cheers!

Thank you very much, very concise and to the point.

Makes perfect sense, since there are no boards and customization is technically possible.

Do you think I might be able to get some help with the programming, though?
I am actually reaching out to the IDE developers, or any member of the community, for that matter, that could assist.
I am not a good programmer, but I manage.
If I can get serial working, I should be done with this chip, as the rest i need to do is pure I/O.

I already got it working with the IDE, if that makes any difference.

The challenge is to modify the hardware serial routines to match this AVR, but not knowing/understanding the function calls makes it hard for me.

Thanks again.

Did you try google? arduino core AT90S8515 - Google Search

There is a lot of info out there!