Maybe I missed something but I see some Turbo Pascal related tools there, and some binaries of TP, and some code written in TP, but not anything that looks like the source code to TP itself. I don't think that was ever released. A well-commented disassembly would be interesting and could possibly be created by devotees, of course.
I never actually used TP myself but it sounded great. These two articles made me interested in it:
Nice! Are the early msdos versions basically the same?
Added: the comments in those files are better than nothing but they don't really say what the program is doing the way the original source code hopefully would. The labels are still the ones generated by the disassembler, so not very informative. Still, it's nice that someone did this and it's a good starting point for further study by anyone sufficiently motivated.
It discusses TP 3.0's operation, supposedly based on a disassembly. It's less interesting than it sounds (it's mostly a high level overview of how a small compiler works, rather than a real study of TP internals), but it helps.
You might also be interested by what appears to be a perfect decompilation (leaked source code?) of the IDE of Turbo Pascal 6.0 written in itself using Turbo Vision and the internal compiler/assembler/debugger : go to http://www.exmortis.narod.ru/index_eng.html in the "Compilers" section and search for "tpascal.zip"
I programmed in CP/M as a teen, and it was a different world then.. Byte Magazine was the way to find out about products and development; machines were connected to each other with a serial cable; a modem was used to send bits over a phone line.
Its annoying to see the comment about 'string safety' .. how about you do what you want with your own computer, which is not logged, watched, billed or updated without your consent. This code relates to a machine that you, as an individual, own. An individual person can do what they want with it, without a spy-OS within the CPU itself, for example.
Its clear (to me) that there has to be a serious fork in CPU development, which will need OS software, maybe back to Z80'ish 8 bits even.. This setup wont display JPG at multiple images per second rate from some centralized media servers, but you know, maybe that is a feature.
The original maintainer died in 2001. Maybe they mean new as in a section that was added by someone else. If that's the case here, it's totally acceptable to always have it be called new
It would be good to port this to Game consoles that use the Z80 CPU and hack together a keyboard and SDCard drive. Make them useful. MOst of the CP/M stuff is on the Internet and some is public domain by now.
> MOst of the CP/M stuff is on the Internet and some is public domain by now.
Sure? AFAIK something can only be considered public domain in one of the following conditions:
- author explicitly uses public domain as a license,
- 120 after publication,
- 120 after registration,
- 95 years after publication if it is corporate work or
- 75 years after the death of the author; whatever comes first.
Is copyright law dating uniform at this point? I wouldn't be surprised if it is...
one thing I remember reading On The Internet a while back was a theory (from a lawyer I believe?) that stated that you can't just say you put something in the public domain, and have it then be in the public domain.
Like, you can choose to explicitly grant rights of usage, but simply writing "I am putting this work in the public domain" doesn't actually do anything, and is functionally very close to being the same as "all rights reserved".
I don't know if it's true though. I suppose we're fortunate that "nobody around to care" helps in practice for these kinds of conservation efforts that are victimless crimes at best.
Retro games consoles are already useful, as games consoles. People collect and play them still. If anything, modding them into an ultra low powered z80 PC would have less usefulness.
As it happens, there already are a number of z80 micro computers out there. Most of which will already have a CP/M port.
CP/M has a BIOS interface for such customization. I’ve written more than several. Knock yourself out. NOTE: Digital Research used the term BIOS to describe its device driver interface long before IBM appropriated it for the IBM PC. It’s definitely not the same thing.
