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Ressurecting an old Megamax/Laser Project - Modern Options?


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I struck gold last weekend and found a 3.5" floppy disk containing the sources for all the Atari ST projects I had done back in the day.

 

Earlier in the month, I thought the disk had gone bad, as my newly acquired 1040ST wouldn't read it, but then I popped in in a Mac -- lo and behold, it was Mac formatted. I must have made it as a backup when I transitioned from working on the 1040ST to going to a Mac Plus. A few projects were missing the .RSC files, but I have the app binaries, so worst case I could re-create them. The big kahuna/find is the Atari ST version of BBS software I'd worked on in the 80s called Plexus (myself and the other auther have also been working on getting the 8-bit version to compile). All the other projects were various MIDI utilities I'd written for myself, as I was in a band at the time, and we used the ST in live performance.

 

Coming back to today...

 

I currently use a Mac as my desktop/development machine.

 

I converted all my old Atari 8-bit projects to ca65 and cc65 and have been *really* happy with that method.

 

While I could try and run Laser C under Hatari, if there is an equivalent to cc65 for ST/68K projects that will run command line on Mac OS, I'd prefer that.

 

I've seen some references to the 80 easy steps to use GCC for Jaguar development. I'm hoping it doesn't come down to that. Or if so, maybe I will try running Laser C under Hatari.

 

Thoughts?

 

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  • 1 month later...

I have Laser C 1.1 running under Hatari on Windows 10.   I was able to compile IG217A.ACC on it and it worked fine.  I had a lot of trouble getting it set up.  Old disks, USB floppy not very reliable to write or read good files.   Once I knew what was the problem I made the images on a older WIN XP system that has a floppy drive in it using MSA.EXE

http://msaconverter.free.fr/index-uk.html

It still made on bad file that I know of gembind.h  I got that fixed and it worked.

 

You might find this useful also...

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/09/03/tutorial-telnet-to-a-bbs-using-a-terminal-program-in-the-hatari-emulator

 

In a couple of years or so when I retire I'll have more time for projects,  working 50 hours a week I'm just spent when I get home.   I have my original 1040STf and a old working hard drive that I wrote Instant Graphics on originally.  The ST when I run it with TOS 1.04 it flakes out after it warms up probably solder joint or bad eprom, but it's solid in TOS 1.0  The hard drive is so ancient I'm amazed it's still going had many others that failed.  Still have a working Atari monochrome monitor, the color one died long ago.    My programming skills are rusty for sure but I could come up to speed pretty fast if and when I get serious about it and have time.

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An update/answering my own question...

 

I managed to get mint on my Mac, which is a 68K cross compiler that can be used from linux (or Mac OS X in my case) command line.

 

I am able to compile (with errors) some of my old projects, but not at the point of them successfully compiling and linking.

 

However this does seem the way to go, is very much like what I do for my 6502 projects with ca65/cc65, and that I'll eventually get there ;-)

 

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  • 2 years later...
11 hours ago, DarkLord said:

Resurrecting an old thread - just curious, did you ever get the ST version

up and running?

 

Thanks.

 

Sadly, no. However I like that @ggn chimed in. I'll have to see if that is a viable option for me.

 

Part of the work is updating the C code to the C-89/ANSI standard (which I happen to like/prefer, but the code is a mix of pre-89 and post 89).

 

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If you have older, non-ANSI, code, it might be just easier to run the original compiler under emulation. Emulators can map host folders to emulated hard disks. So you don't even need to bother copying your source files between the host and the emulator.

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1 hour ago, ijor said:

If you have older, non-ANSI, code, it might be just easier to run the original compiler under emulation. Emulators can map host folders to emulated hard disks. So you don't even need to bother copying your source files between the host and the emulator.

I took that approach with the first old 8-bit assembler project I had resurrected from source. I was glad I didi it, but then after that I moved to updating/modernizing and getting it to assemble with ca65.

 

For a one-off (just to get it to compile, not planning to do more) I think emulating the tool chain could make sense, but I have the feeling I'd be investing a similar amount of time in bringing up/re-familiarizing myself with the tool chain as I would in moving to a new tool chain, and that once I had it compiling, I'd then want to start making the app better ;-) 

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8-bit tools (and their modern counterparts) have far less gotchas than 16-bit ones. For starters, C compilers used to be really stupid and allowed unthinkable ;) things to write (and to work!). Throwing a source code from the 80s at the latest gcc and trying to fix it may be harder than basically just reading the code and rewriting it from scratch.

 

Typical traps: 16-bit ints, different function bindings, different struct members, assuming order of instructions, ignoring the need of volatile and so on and so on. Way easier just to acquire the original compiler and one by one to update the code to at least ANSI C.

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