OS and/or compiler for CompuPro CPU-32016?

From: Graham Toal <gtoal_at_gtoal.com>
Date: Mon Feb 7 19:47:32 2005

> First off, does anybody even know if an OS was made available
> for the CPU-32016? Never saw one in person, nor heard what was
> being done with them. So any anecdotal stories would be welcome
> in addition to hard facts.
>
> Second, were any compilers available for these things? Cross
> compiling using e.g. gcc may be taken as given, I mean
> something running native, or on another CompuPro system.
>
> Thanks,
> --Steve.
>
> PS - No I don't have one, but I'm a fan of the ns32k family.

Acorn had a ModulaII compiler for the 32016, plus Pascal and Imp which
the Pascal compiler was written in. Unfortunately the sources of the
latter two I believe are completely lost; however although I don't have
the source of the MII compiler I suspect that someone could track down
Mike Jordan who undoubtedly saved a copy.

I do have binaries of all three of the above, for the Acorn Cambridge
Workstation (Panos). If it were absolutely necessary, it could be possible
to write an object file modifier which converted the Acorn binaries
(in a relocatable loader format) to any other format. Somewhere I
have a paper listing of Mark Taunton's linker/loader for the ACW which
should be enough to document the format. Since the ACW was a host processor
and deferred all IO to a slave processor, the IO should be modular and
easy to replace.

If anyone knows of a 32016 emulator I'ld be interested to hear it.
Would be cool to hook one up to a Beeb emulator and get Panos running
again. I think I have most of what was released for Panos, on 5.25"
floppies, which I'm in the process of recovering (very slowly; the
process consists of manual entering every directory then *dump'ing the
files to he screen which is spooling to a windows text file, then
decoding the hex dump with a C program. The utility on the net that
is supposed to read whole disks and upload them is quite broken, and
also many of the disks have occassional bad blocks which few of these
programs can continue past. Not to mention way too many different
filesystem formats and disk densities etc etc. Wish I had time to
do this properly :-/ )


Graham
Received on Mon Feb 07 2005 - 19:47:32 GMT