On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 19:47 -0600, Graham Toal wrote:
> 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;
I keep on hearing of some mythical document archive at Acorn - a room
full of servers which acted as a central document/code repository.
Supposedly the archives held stuff dating a long way back, so in theory
would have code from the 32016 copro days and earlier.
The machines were scrapped / sold off a while ago; the fate of the hard
drives is unclear but they would have been wiped if not destroyed.
However, it's still possible that backup media *might* have survived in
the hands of an employee - you never know, it might surface again one
day.
> 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.
We do need to collect all this together in one place! I've now got hold
of disk images for Qudos' QuickChip design software which they ran on
the ACW - whether it's just the 6502 version or actual 32016 binaries
remains to be seen (I'm awaiting room to dig the ACW out and try it!).
Qudos are the only commercial company I know of who routinely used ACWs.
> If anyone knows of a 32016 emulator I'ld be interested to hear it.
Don't know of one - but the 32000-series databook is on bitsavers if
someone fancied doing some coding :)
> Would be cool to hook one up to a Beeb emulator and get Panos running
> again.
Not as good as the real hardware though :)
> I think I have most of what was released for Panos, on 5.25"
> floppies,
Disks 1-6 for the copro are at:
http://8-bit.summerfield-technology.co.uk/varia/32016/index.html
There seemed to be a handful of Panos versions though, then I'm not sure
if there were differences in the 32016 copro / ACW releases to account
for the ACW boards being able to take more memory. Probably not, but you
never know.
Grr, I need to get all these snippets of info I have in emails collected
together and put up on the web somewhere...
> The utility on the net that
> is supposed to read whole disks and upload them is quite broken,
Xfer? That's the only thing I've ever found that works for me; I've
never been able to read BBC-format floppies on any of the PCs that I've
tried, so serial link from a real BBC has been the only way. Can't
comment on how well it handles errors, but it did the job of imaging
disks onto my linux PC quite happily.
cheers
Jules
Received on Tue Feb 08 2005 - 05:11:17 GMT