Pascal for ZX81

[Paul]

Zxblast is much more advanced and professional.
My card just has eight jumpers to define where RAM or ROM can be found.
And you need a driver for the usb drive which can be in the ROM or RAM.
It's got no clock and no configuration saving etc.
So my version is primitive compared to Pokémon's

[siggi]

Ok, I believe I've finished cleaning it up and apply typographic magic.

This will also be on archive.org any minute now.

I found some misprints in the manual. And some functions and procedures are missing in chapter 5.13 (e. g. ram,usr,lsl,move,page).
Any chance, to update the manual?

Siggi

[jdfan1000]

Yes, please! How would you like to send them?

[siggi]

If you have the manual as DOC (MS-Word) or Open Office file, I could do the changes in that document and send it back to you.

Or I could make screenshots of the errors and could add a description, what needs to be done.

[jdfan1000]

I'll save to Word (I'm pretty sure I used Pages). Can you send me your email in a PM?

[Vorticon]

Would love to see an updated manual. I have a project I'd like to use the Pascal package for, warts and all.

[siggi]

There is a thread in the German Forum which gives possibilities to use partial Pascal without the need of using tape.
It's for 48K RAM only, so not suitable for plain ZXPAND users.
https://forum.tlienhard.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=4076

Meanwhile there is also a solution for "plain ZXPAND users" (32KB ram at 16K-48K): https://forum.tlienhard.com/phpBB3/view ... 799#p53799

[siggi]

Thanks for this Christoph.

It is a shame that partial Pascal cannot do more because I think it is good to have other languages for the Zeddy and try a different way of working.

It is also a shame you cannot access the full 32 k of the ZXpand which for example H4th can do ( although it still uses tape load and save. )
Hopefully someone with the skills to do it could take it forward like Kmurta and Roganjosh have done with Forth79 and make it a really useful language.


Thanks again for taking timeout with this.

Moggy.

According to my tests it is possible to use more than 16kB only at runtime (menu 3: load and execute): https://forum.tlienhard.com/phpBB3/view ... 650#p53650

The editor does not work with more than 16 kb ram, but if a compiled program needs more space for arrays or dynamically allocated space (ram-function), poking RAMTOP helps ....

Siggi

PS: I didn't check, whether the maximum stack size is affected

[Vorticon]

I'm looking for a random seed to feed a simple pseudo-random integer number generator I'm working on for Partial Pascal since the latter does not have a built-in RND function. Is there a good location in memory that is variable enough I could peek at for that purpose? Partial Pascal does have the MEM function which is the equivalent of PEEK/POKE.

[Vorticon]

I'll answer my own question. Kelly Abrantes Murta on the ZX81 FB page suggested using the FRAMES system variable at 16436 and 16437 which is decremented with each image frame. I just used the lower address as this will be changing more quickly and worked just fine.
If S is the seed, then S:=MEM(.16436.) can be used to set it.