MartyG wrote:
Hi All;
Thank You, Gordon, for Your Prompt Reply, and help..
I have much of Martin Richards BCPL stuff, and I will take a look later at what I have..
He had a Disk Crash awhile back and I was able to help Him get some of His files Restored, from my back-ups..
I will look into the BBC Micro and other related files when I have the time..
Again, THANK YOU for Your Help and Suggestions.. Marty
I think it's one of those rock/hard places to work with - if you want to start from scratch and make a 16-bit BCPL system and are happy with cross compiling on (e.g. a Linux desktop) then it's probably not that hard. Even a 32-bit system on a 65C02 shouldn't be too difficult to imagine, but again cross compiling.
And there we have another conundrum - the current flashy 6502 projects seem to be designed for just that - compile C on a desktop and drag and drop an entire binary, bootstrap, code, the lot into some smart device incorporating either a real or emulated 6502 and "Ooo - look, I can blink an LED" and it's only taken 100 lines of C compiling to 10K of 6502 ....
What I wanted something that was a bit of a modern take on the thing I used in the 80s which wasn't some big S100 type thing running CP/M...
The current BCPL compiler is pushing 50KB (binary) so running it on a 6502 is not going to happen - hence I went to the 65816. It was not all I expected and the effort of making it look like a 32-bit virtual machine to the underlying BCPL was not as easy as I felt I could have been - and it wasn't as fast as I felt it could have been.
I did manage to get the original Acornsoft ROM going on my original 6502 system, but it won't run on the 816, even in emulation mode - I've not spent too much time, but I think it's because I moved the OS vectors and the BCPL ROM has them encoded in some weird way that my system can't find (I moved the Acorn MOS vectors due to the clash with the hardware vectors in the '816 and I can patch the BBC Basic, COMAL, and a few other ROMs just fine).
I'm interested to know how you're getting on though - maybe you can become the 3rd active BCPL programmer on the planet
Cheers,
-Gordon
_________________
--
Gordon Henderson.
See my
Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here:
https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/