Willard Goosey @goosey@mastodon.sdf.org
old computer nerd, car guy, science fiction and fantasy fan, cat lover
Joined Jan 2019
ArmBob is the RISC OS port of David Betz's Bob, a C++ subset interpreter, from 1991.
Gavin Wraith did the port but let it die because he thought lua was better.
Since RISC OS continues to sputter along, he (Wraith) did a recompile for 32bit and re-released ArmBob!
I feel like I should write something in ArmBob.
OK, a few weeks ago ROOL announced (and I read) that they updated the RISC OS assembler to support the new 16 bit floats in new ARM chips.
I've been thinking about this ever since, and it still doesn't make sense to me.
16 bit floats? in 2021? Really? Why?
And I'm not being sarcastic here, I really don't understand. What is the use case?
My mind is blown!!!!!
My RISC OS port of ASM80 is in the first draft of the 2020 RISC OS awards poll discussion for "Best non-commericial software".
If that's not clear (it barely is to me), this is the opening of discussions for which items should be in the poll which would be run to find the winners.
Ok, IMHO asm80 is a good solid assembler.
That anything I'm responsible for gets even this far? Blows my mind.
Part of yesterday's coco adventures involved Ultra Edit, the best (imho) DECB text editor.
Problem is, ultra edit isn't emacs, or vi, or wordstar, or even edt. Completely its own thing. I can't ever remember the keys.
I wrote out a cheatsheet but yeah... my writing..
So today i hammered out the cheatsheet in Ovation under RISC OS! Now it's all pretty and readable, and in an 18 point font so I can read it!
OK slight correction, Risc OS kermit still works on 5.28 & ARMv7, at least sort of....
terminal mode is fine (vt52 ugh!) but I'm not having much luck with kermit file transfers. Might not be its fault though, as the linux c-kermit I was talking to has problems with file transfers to CP/M kermit, so it may be the linux Kermit is broken.
There are 2 remaining terminal emulator programs(*) for RISC OS, Hearsay and Connector. I had Connector working with the Pi2's internal serial port. This evening I sat down and poked at Hearsay until it worked also. :-)
It took a little convincing. Hearsay is not really set up to easily switch from one serial port to another.
(*)as in for talking to a serial port, not net connections or whatever
The last time I got computer parts I threw in a Digilent PmodRS232. That's a MAX3232 on a db-9. A chip that converts from modern GPIO style 3.3v signals to +/-12v RS232 signals for some old-school serial port action. I didn't really need it but I used to do lots of rs232 stuff.
Last night I decided that I could burn a few hours by using it to get the Pi2's serial port out and useable under RISC OS.
Found another little 26bit RISC OS program with source to attempt a recompile. A little ray-tracer ported from Amiga...
First of all, the BBCBASIC program that converts the ray-tracer's output to acorn Sprite format has 26bit assembly routines and is just borked.
Second, the included source is only the original(?) msdos source, not the source for the full RISC OS app!
Who does that! That's just messed up!
I found out last night that the I-APL organization did indeed port their APL interpreter to RISC OS.
Of course it's 26 bit only with no source. :-(
But I feel better anyway. :-)
I played with iapl on my CoCo3 under OS-9 a fair bit, and it worked well. I just didn't have a lot of vector / matrix math I needed to do.
Looking through the RISC OS source for the old Icon 8 language.
It looks like, in order to give ICON (a nice language, but one with its own ideas about memory usage) a useful SWI interface, they had to add a cheaty call to low-level allocate unformatted blocks of memory, and then add calls to read / write these blocks.
I suspect I'd have to duplicate this work to give xlisp an SWI interface.
I don't know if I'm that good a programmer. Or that modivated. :-(
I wanted to make a simple little poster using Ovation under RISC OS. The complication was, this poster needs to be laid out in landscape, and I couldn't figure out how to do that!
But tonight I googled about Ovation and got the docs for Ovation Pro and figured out how to do it!
Don't just click the icon, that gets you a portrait A4 page, gotta menu-click the menu then go to new document, and that gets a nice settings box where you can set up all the page stuff!
The RISC OS software I've been working on:
These are all compiled for 32-bit RISC OS, using RO 5.28 and DDE 28 on a Raspberry Pi2 All include full source.
http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/riscos/cawf410-2020-12-13.zip
http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/riscos/epson2ps-2020-12-13.zip
http://www.sdc.org/~goosey/riscos/moontool327-20201217.zip
Ya, that RISC OS program I gave up on recompiling as 32-bit? I couldn't stay away, and had to try again.
Got a lot further this time. Actually figured out why I was getting pointers into the 0-page.
But now I've hit another stumbling block and have cried for help on the ROOL forum.
We'll see if I get any response...
I feel like I should make a database in DataPower (a rather nice RISC OS DBM) but I don't really have any ideas of what I should make it for/of.
I have kinda a love/hate thing with databases. They're useful and interesting but I hate them. It's mostly mental scar tissue from the formal CS databases class I took. That class ruined databases for me.
I think I'm getting close with epson2ps... It does the right thing with a flat ascii file.
Would've been a lot easier if unixlib included open() but I guess that's too much to ask of a UNIX compatibility library. :-/
Ok, I'm pretty sure cawf 4.10 is the last version of cawf. It's from 1996. The minix version I was playing with earlier is either 4.8 or 4.9.
(groff released in '97, pretty much made cawf pointless)
It was an easy port to RISC OS. I have a little bit of packaging to do yet but it's basically done.
Unfortunately it still can't deal with mandoc or mdoc manpages.
I successfully updated my #RaspberryPi #Pi2 to RISC OS 5.28!
AFAICT everything's working fine!
old computer nerd, car guy, science fiction and fantasy fan, cat lover
Joined Jan 2019
