Ressurecting an old Megamax/Laser Project - Modern Options?

[+bhall408]

I struck gold last weekend and found a 3.5" floppy disk containing the sources for all the Atari ST projects I had done back in the day.

 

Earlier in the month, I thought the disk had gone bad, as my newly acquired 1040ST wouldn't read it, but then I popped in in a Mac -- lo and behold, it was Mac formatted. I must have made it as a backup when I transitioned from working on the 1040ST to going to a Mac Plus. A few projects were missing the .RSC files, but I have the app binaries, so worst case I could re-create them. The big kahuna/find is the Atari ST version of BBS software I'd worked on in the 80s called Plexus (myself and the other auther have also been working on getting the 8-bit version to compile). All the other projects were various MIDI utilities I'd written for myself, as I was in a band at the time, and we used the ST in live performance.

 

Coming back to today...

 

I currently use a Mac as my desktop/development machine.

 

I converted all my old Atari 8-bit projects to ca65 and cc65 and have been *really* happy with that method.

 

While I could try and run Laser C under Hatari, if there is an equivalent to cc65 for ST/68K projects that will run command line on Mac OS, I'd prefer that.

 

I've seen some references to the 80 easy steps to use GCC for Jaguar development. I'm hoping it doesn't come down to that. Or if so, maybe I will try running Laser C under Hatari.

 

Thoughts?

 

[IGS GUY]

I have Laser C 1.1 running under Hatari on Windows 10.   I was able to compile IG217A.ACC on it and it worked fine.  I had a lot of trouble getting it set up.  Old disks, USB floppy not very reliable to write or read good files.   Once I knew what was the problem I made the images on a older WIN XP system that has a floppy drive in it using MSA.EXE

http://msaconverter.free.fr/index-uk.html

It still made on bad file that I know of gembind.h  I got that fixed and it worked.

 

You might find this useful also...

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/09/03/tutorial-telnet-to-a-bbs-using-a-terminal-program-in-the-hatari-emulator

 

In a couple of years or so when I retire I'll have more time for projects,  working 50 hours a week I'm just spent when I get home.   I have my original 1040STf and a old working hard drive that I wrote Instant Graphics on originally.  The ST when I run it with TOS 1.04 it flakes out after it warms up probably solder joint or bad eprom, but it's solid in TOS 1.0  The hard drive is so ancient I'm amazed it's still going had many others that failed.  Still have a working Atari monochrome monitor, the color one died long ago.    My programming skills are rusty for sure but I could come up to speed pretty fast if and when I get serious about it and have time.

[+bhall408]

An update/answering my own question...

 

I managed to get mint on my Mac, which is a 68K cross compiler that can be used from linux (or Mac OS X in my case) command line.

 

I am able to compile (with errors) some of my old projects, but not at the point of them successfully compiling and linking.

 

However this does seem the way to go, is very much like what I do for my 6502 projects with ca65/cc65, and that I'll eventually get there