Installation

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Suggested hardware mods

Hardware modifications

You need to make the suggested hardware modifications — or at least the one for the serial interface — in order to communicate with the G-Pascal system.

Assemble source

The source to the G-Pascal system is here.

If you have installed the hardware mod to give you more memory, change the line in the source:

HIGHEST_RAM = $3FFF    ; original board hardware

to be:

HIGHEST_RAM = $5FFF    ; with suggested additional AND gate

You can assemble it yourself by downloading Vasm from http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm/:

vasm6502_oldstyle gpascal.asm -wdc02 -esc -Fbin -o gpascal.bin -dotdir -L gpascal.list

Or, just use the gpascal.bin file already in that directory.

Assemble options

There are some conditional assembly options near the start of gpascal.asm:

LCD_SUPPORT = 1       ; 1 = support LCD, 0 = not. Unset if you have removed the LCD.
USE_CP437_FONT = 1    ; 1 = include the symbols for the CP437 font for use with MAX7219 chip, 0 = omit them
USE_PASCAL = 1        ; 1 = include the G-Pascal compiler, 0 = omit it
USE_ASSEMBLER = 1     ; 1 = include the assembler, 0 = omit it

If you remove LCD support, CP437 support and choose either USE_PASCAL or USE_ASSEMBLER then the assembled code will fit into 16k, which would be useful if you are assembling it for a 6502 system with only 16k of EEPROM. So, you could have a system that either runs Pascal, or Assembler. Maybe burn two chips so you can insert the one for the job at hand today. :)

In that case you would also have to change:

START_OF_ROM = $8000     ; where the ROM chip starts

to:

START_OF_ROM = $C000     ; where the ROM chip starts

Installing Vasm

(Instructions for Linux, should work the same on the Mac, perhaps install Cygwin or MS-VSC++ for Windows)

  1. Download vasm from http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vasm/release/vasm.tar.gz

  2. Unzip the archive, eg.

    tar xzf vasm.tar.gz

  3. Change to the vasm directory:

    cd vasm

  4. Build the source:

    make CPU=6502 SYNTAX=oldstyle

    If you are not using Linux see Vasm Compilation Instructions. You may need to replace the word “make” with “make -f Makefile.Cygwin” or “make -f Makefile.Win32”.

  5. Copy the executable somewhere handy if you wish. For example:

    sudo cp vasm6502_oldstyle /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod o+rx /usr/local/bin/vasm6502_oldstyle

Burn EEPROM

Install gpascal.bin onto your EEPROM as follows:

minipro -p AT28C256 -w gpascal.bin

Minipro is available from https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/minipro.

Alternatively use your own programmer and programming utility and follow the instructions you used to put the code onto the EEPROM when building Ben’s Board.

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Suggested hardware mods

License

Information and images on this site are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License unless stated otherwise.

Source code licensed under the MIT License.