About a MSX cross development environment, writing Pascal code

Master (193)

23-09-2015, 13:41

Hi folks, I decided to stop moaning and write code for MSX again. I'm a Pascal freak, and I want to write Pascal code for MSX again. Yeah, I kno about how superb Z80 Assembly is, but I'm lazy and I don't have time/patience to try to learn Asm again. I know sdcc C compiler, and its patches to generate MSX code, but my heart belongs to Niklaus Wirth's most famous computer language.

I'm a Linux user too, my first (and only) desktop operating system, so I don't want a Windows solution: I just wanna write MSX code between two school classes (I'm a teacher and sysadmin) in my notebook, or when I'm bored.

So, I thought about using gedit (which is a great text editor for GNOME) and a set of shell scripts to control OpenMSX, in order to compile my Pascal program using a command-line compiler, like Turbo Pascal 3.3.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

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Por AxelStone

Prophet (3064)

23-09-2015, 14:22

First of all, wellcome. I love Pascal too, I think it's a very friendly language so I agree with you, it's a very good language to develop (ASM is not the only language of MSX). Last time I coded in Pascal was a lot of years aso, and I used MSX directly. As far as I know you could try 2 options:

1) there is a cross develop enviroment (for Windows, sorry!) named MSXPad, perhaps it works fine with wine.
2) You can install on Linux some disk image app since you can edit files with gedit and when you want compile, simple drop file into disk image and compile with openMSX.

Good luck!

Por Necron

Prophet (2266)

23-09-2015, 20:53

Dude, I also love Pascal... I also always wanted to create applications to MSX on it, but never quite started...

Por Marq

Champion (387)

23-09-2015, 21:01

WRDSK here works on Linux command line. Might be something else useful, too:
http://www.kameli.net/lt/devel.html

Por Grauw

Ascended (10317)

23-09-2015, 21:07

With openMSX, you can use the dir-as-dsk feature to access the host file system directly, so you won’t need to use a tool to create disk images…

Por AxelStone

Prophet (3064)

23-09-2015, 21:48

Grauw wrote:

With openMSX, you can use the dir-as-dsk feature to access the host file system directly, so you won’t need to use a tool to create disk images…

Sounds really great: http://openmsx.org/manual/user.html#dirasdisk

However it seems limited to 720Kb, so it's not a real hard disk ;(

Por Manuel

Ascended (18398)

23-09-2015, 22:20

It's dir-as-disk, not dir-as-harddisk....

Por rjp

Master (193)

26-09-2015, 18:44

HI folks, thanks for the help.

I'm following JaviLM's article list in order to create my "cross development suite", and there is a whole new world to explore.

OpenMSX is very flexible and powerful, and it runs smoothly in Linux. It'll be my testbed.

There are some questions regarding TP33F package from MSX Club Enschede, maybe there's someone who can help me...
- In order to compile and execute any program (using TURBO.COM into MSX or TP3.EXE into DOS - I used DOSBOX), I need to load MEMMAN, GIOS.TSR and GIOS.COM. But does I need to use these packages everytime I want to develop? Does I need to send them with my newly-compiled program, and does I need to use it every time I will run my compiled program?
- I tried TP3.EXE using DOSBox. But when I try to execute the new .COM file, it hangs the emulator. I tried already that batch file, which compiles as a CHN file and links RUNTIME.COM, but I've got an "Illegal Path". Finally, I tried a cat > in Linux, but there was a message regarding lack of memory. Any clues about this?
- BTW, there is any English documentation? It's painful to translate everything from Dutch to English using Google Translator.

Thanks for any help. Regards, Ricardo.

Por Manuel

Ascended (18398)

26-09-2015, 21:04

- to compile (on MSX) you *only* need TURBO.COM, at least if you don't use the GIOS stuff. At run time you also don't need these, if you indeed don't use anything of GIOS.
- what docs do you need?

Por Grauw

Ascended (10317)

26-09-2015, 21:44

Manuel wrote:

It's dir-as-disk, not dir-as-harddisk....

Would it be hard to add?

Por ren

Paragon (1912)

26-09-2015, 22:25

Grauw wrote:

Would it be hard to add?

+1 would be a cool/great feature!