Mad Pascal | Hacker News Reader

Mad Pascal

github.com

70 pointschaimanmeow24 comments

Holy shit, that's some mad retro dev.

Now if we can just get a clone of Borland C++/TASM/Profiler/Debugger on 6502. >:-)

I spoke too soon, an HNer probably wrote it already in Rust.

Edit: Wikipedia just made the connection in my mind that many 1978-1990-era consumer computing and gaming things were all "6800 lite".

- Acorn Atom, Electron

- Apple I, II, IIe

- Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, 800, Lynx

- Baby! 1

- BBC Master, Micro

- Commodore PET, VIC-20, 64 (C-64), 128

- Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) / Family Computer (Famicom) (JP)

- Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P

- Orao

- Oric-1

- Oric Atmos

- TurboGrafx-16 ! :D

- Bender's brain ;)

Btw, here's a 100 MHz 65C02 compatible. https://hackaday.com/2021/10/15/heres-a-100-mhz-pin-compatib...

Maybe not TASM, but Mad Pascal has a sister project called MADS [1]

[1] https://github.com/tebe6502/Mad-Assembler

Nes was 6502

I think their point was that the 6502 was '6800-lite', as all the systems they listed were (primarily - some of them had a z80 co-processor/option) 6502

i think commodore might have released a dual socket 6502 + 8086 system, so that it could run CP/M. A z80+6502 dual processor hybrid would also pretty interesting. Link would be nice if you know any more information.

The C128 (and C128D/C128DR) had a 6502 (well, the '8510' version I think) and a Z80 co-processor for CP/M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_128

The Commodore B128 (aka CBM II) had a 6502 (6509 in this case), and either a 8088 or a Z80 as an optional card for running CP/M-86 and MS-DOS, or CP/M programs respectively (the 8088 card would make it a DOS compatible, but not an IBM compatible).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CBM-II

Of the others in the list, The BBC Micro had an optional Z80, NS 32016 or 6502 co-processor via the 'Tube' port. The BBC Master had an optional Z80, NS 32016, 6502 or ARM1 co-processor via the same 'Tube' port OR a 80186 via an internal card.

I think there were Z80 cards for the Apple IIs for CP/M, there was certainly a 8086-family card for them for MS-DOS. (After checking, the 'Microsoft Softcard' was a Z80 expansion for the Apple II that gave it CP/M support.

Not on the list in this part of the thread, there was also the Super-PET which had a 6502 and a 6809 for various languages and presumably OS/9.

One of the universities I went to also had an oddity in the form of a 3-CPU Super-PET with a Z80 in addition to the 6502 and 6809, but given that it had a huge hole cut in the side of the machine for an extra PCB, with a hand-wired 'CPU' switch, I'm guessing that was probably some weird homegrown bastardisation of a regular SuperPET, assuming it worked (I never saw it powered on).

thanks for that detailed bit of eccentric 80s history! Yup it was the C128 I was thinking of but I incorrectly thought it had an x86-predecessor instead of the Z80. The C128 has it all, including good looks.

Ohio Scientific. There's a name I haven't heard in a while...

Interesting project title. Pascal being the French scientist and philosopher who came up with a good chunk of chemistry and was ultimately driven insane by trying to reconcile too many incompatible beliefs in his mind, and rejecting too few (religion, orthodoxy, science, formal logic and reason).

I'd like to see some evidence that he was ultimately driven insane by trying to reconcile too many incompatible beliefs; I have never heard that before and am not convinced it's true. (He certainly seems to have been something of a religious fanatic in his later years, but that isn't the same thing.)

Psychoanalyzing people is always error-prone. Even more so if done by amateurs. And even more than that if done to people we don't know. And even more than that if they're people from history.

Or maybe heavy metal poisoning. Chemistry can be dangerous.

An impressive compiler project which is used for retro title releases such as Star Vagrant and Block Attack.

Interesting stuff. Perhaps I can use this to learn retro game programming with Pascal. So the 1st question: how to build the compiler?

I'm still navigating the github repo and didn't find any specific readme/makefile. Perhaps I missed something...

It provides a binary already compiled on bin folder.

Also most likely fpc src/mp.pas takes care of compiling everything.

Thanks.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tebe6502/Mad-Pascal/master...

  wc mp.pas 
  52411  186123 1638175 mp.pas

I see references to cc65—hopefully this is not needed. Perhaps, it uses features from the macro assembler ca65.

I think cc65 is a popular C cross compiler for 6502.

Maybe Mad Pascal translates Pascal to C, then uses cc65??

I'm on macOS, so gotta build the thing from source since there's no mac binary on it.

And fpc src/mp.pas produced some errors. Oh well. Gotta check at weekend.

Looking at the assembler (https://github.com/tebe6502/Mad-Assembler), it looks like it uses Delphi, so might do it,

    fpc -Mdelphi -vh -O3 mp.pas

Is there anything about this compiler that keeps it from supporting the older Atari 8-bit machines? It's curious that it lists support for "Atari XE/XL."

"Atari XE/XL" as in "Atari 8-bit". The XEs/XLs were way more popular in Poland than the 400s/800s.

Perhaps I chose my words carelessly, but I was asking if the compiler supports the older Atari 8-bit machines as well as the newer ones that are listed.

It does.

800 and even the 400 were mighty expensive. They arrived slightly before 1980 and this was the very start of the home computer era. The price was sky high, and it took a few years for the XL and the price wars with Commodore to make home computing truly affordable for the masses.

The Polish continued to buy 8-bit XE's when the rest of the first world was moving to 16-bit in the early 90s (68000, 286). They weren't missing out on much in my opinion; I think 16-bit for both computing and consoles didn't add much. Once the 386sx arrived it made the PC truly affordable and capable; the software system was still 16-bit DOS/Win3, and these PC's were ready and waiting for 32-bit software, which with the birth of Linux and BSD catapulted the PC into the true computing age.

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