Hi all,
isn't Turbo maintained by Grorge Gwilt?
Wolfgang
On 07/10/2016 02:22 PM, Norman Dunbar wrote:
Afternoon all.
I think, but I'm not 100% certain, that the source code for Turbo, The Editor
etc, by the author who's name escapes me right now, are or were online many
years ago. I may even have downloaded them at some point. I remember definitely
looking through the source for The Editor so I did get it somewhere legal.
Having said that, I don't remember if Cport was included.
Reverse engineering a compiled SuperBasic task might be more trouble than
simply rewriting from scratch? If necessary there's a program I wrote yes ago,
which Dilwyn updated, that decodes a QSAVE'd program. I'm certain that could be
used as the basis for a new Cport lexer perhaps. It is called something like
decode_qsave or similar.
There's a doc file here, I think it's Word format:
http://www.sitelevel.com/click?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.dilwyn.me.uk%2fdocs%2fformats%2fsavfiles.doc&sid=YCsXx5g7rfbNG11e
- which contains a listing of the program.
Doing it as new should allow the cfix stuff to be included without needing a
separate task to do it. Plus, it could be made easier to translate to C - how
hard could it be? ;-)
To be honest, I paid for Cport all those years ago, but have used it
infrequently. It's a great idea, it fell down in practice. There always seemed
to be far too much work post conversion just to get a clean C68 compile,never
mind getting the code to work!
Cheers,
Norm.
On 9 July 2016 22:17:45 BST, Michael Bulford <michaelbulf...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
On Thursday 7 July 2016, 21:29:04, Rich Mellor (RWAP) wrote :
Shirley Butler (C-Fix program for use with SuperBASIC C-Port) - not
sure if she
had any more involvement in C-Port. I also emailed Dave Walker, but
no response
from either
Hi Rich,
I also wrote to Shirley, but had no response. This morning,
I tried ringing her on the number she gave in the C-Fix user manual
from 1992, but this was unobtainable. Are you still in contact with
Freddy Vaccha? Perhaps he might know something.
What I would like to do is to get a copy of the source SuperBASIC code
for both C-Port and C-Fix. The idea being to update them so that they
can work fully with modern day emulators, and also to cure some bugs
and generally improve them. I have actually managed to use C-Port
with some success. Recently I have C-Ported a 58k SBASIC program into
Cee without any problems. I did of course have to keep on changing the
code until it finally Cported. The resulting Cee code certainly needed
some tinkering with before it would C68 compile. The program was a
version of the Travelling Salesman program, which I have been working
on with Steve Poole. In my opinion, C-Port is far better than its
reputation, but is certainly in need of some improvement. The C-Fix
addition is very useful, however it is not complete. The numeric array
bases have not been treated.
If however the source is unavailable, then how about reverse
engineering?Derek, have you thought any more about your idea of reverse
engineering Turbo? I would be willing to work with you jointly on
this. I am well acquainted with the Turbo parser and understand how it
works. If you can regenerate the pseudo-code for C-Port, I am sure I
could regenerate the SuperBASIC code from there. What we could end up
with is a SuperBASIC program that perhaps works, but would be totally
unreadable, since we would not know the original variable names used.
We would just have to guess at how it works. But this would be a
start. This may take some while to complete, but the more time spent
on it, the better it would become.
About the legal aspect, I would agree this may be illegal - if we go by
the letter of the law. But if we go by the spirit of the law, this may
be another matter. We would be producing something that would be of
benefit to the whole QL community. I am certain the authors of Turbo /
Cport / C-Fix would welcome our contributions.
We may not have to go down this road. Who knows - perhaps Freddy
Vaccha can come up with the goods - and supply the SuperBASIC sources.
If anybody knows him, can you please contact him and ask.
Michael
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