Ancient 6502 FOCAL source code

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Sun Sep 30 09:21:37 2001

PAL-65 is the Assembler written by Wayne Wall and friends at the Colorado School
of Mines in the mid-'70's and patterened after the PAL-10 assembler for the DEC
KA-10 that CSM had at the time. Its syntax, like many DEC products, differs
from what's used throughout the rest of the industry but only in a few
significant ways. The differences fall into two classes: (a) the assembler
pseudo-op's, and (b) the instruction syntax.

Now, I haven't used this stuff in years, but, instead of EQU, DB, DW, ORG, etc,
.DEF, .BYTE, .WORD, .LOC and others. These should be quite recognizable in the
early version, e.g. the FOCAL source. Later versions had word operations added
as hard-coded macros to parallel what the Apple Assembler had added, just for
convenience. The way in which the two deal with the indirection and indexing in
the 6502 is different as well, from what was used in "the rest of the industry"
... more or less ...

These differences are really quite regular and a few editor macros should fix
them without incident. You do have to catch them all, however. I'll eventually
have the source and executables for the PAL-65 assembler available as well,
though, once again, they'll be the versions for the APEX OS, which means they'll
still be of little use to those not using APEX. I have source listings for the
earlier standalone version of the assembler, but they're on very aged
"green-bar" paper that has deteriorated from quite readable to barely so over
the 20+ years they've been around and my attempts to OCR them have been futile,
so far. There's also a manual, though I'm not sure I have a machine-readable
version of that at all.

These will also be made available as I unearth them.

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Iggy Drougge" <optimus_at_canit.se>
To: "Richard Erlacher" <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2001 7:00 AM
Subject: Re: Ancient 6502 FOCAL source code


> Richard Erlacher skrev:
>
> >I've got the machine readable FOCAL source file available now. It's in 6502
> >Assembly Language, PAL65 syntax, which will make DEC-users comfortable and
> >the rest of us cringe, but that's what available.
>
> Why, what's PAL65?
>
> --
> En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.
>
>
Received on Sun Sep 30 2001 - 09:21:37 BST