One puzzle from cross compilation with 2 different versions of GCC?

[Zhang, Vic]

To whom it may concern,
 
 
I used to compile my program with gcc-2.7.2 for Sparc, recently I wanted to support Unicode in my program and found gcc-2.7.2 can't support Unicode at all. After that I change to gcc-2.96. However, the output format of the latter one is elf32-sparc and that of the first one is a.out-sunos-big. So I can't partially link the code generated with gcc-2.96 with some old library generated with gcc-2.7.2 with option -r even if --oformat a.out-sunos-big is specified. I think gcc-2.96 maybe support a.out-sunos-big format, but I can't find anything useful. Can you help me solve this problem or give me some useful hint?
 
Best wishes,
 
 
Vic