Color Computer Pascal

Pascal Programming with Tandy's Color Computer 3 and NitrOS-9 Level II

Updated August 15, 2005

Quick Pascal 0.9 is now available. This version does not use the RAM disk and is intended for use by those who have a hard drive, either on a bona fide Color Computer 3 or emulator.

I have recently started using MESS and NitrOS-9 almost exclusively. This is largely a function of limited space in my office. This version of Quick Pascal has been compiled using MacMess 0.96, 6309 ROM, and NitrOS-9 build 030205. The emulator system disk* boots to a 90 mb virtual hard drive** (2 mb zip file) using the drivers provided with Jeff Vavasour's Color Computer 3 Emulator for the PC. The boot disk also supports 2 megabytes of RAM with MESS. If you download the ROM, floppy boot disk, and virtual hard disk, you should be ready to go.

*With permission from Boisy Pitre
**With permission from Jeff Vavasour

What you need:

Don't know Pascal? check out this site.

Theory of Operation:

When OS-9 Pascal was released in the early 1980s, only OS-9 Level I was available. The limitation of 64k prevented the OS-9 Pascal package from being used quickly, as it required a variety of steps in editing, compiling, translating and assembling, each step requiring lots of disk access.

With the release of Level II, 512k RAM (or more) and hard disks, the avenue to rapid Pascal development was simplified. Effectively, all that "Quick Pascal" does is to provide a front to the OS-9 Pascal implementation in a user-friendly, menu-driven API. The application loads all necessary programs (user-defined) and does all I/O to the hard disk.

Bug Reports and Solutions

If you're having problems or discover a bug, please send me an email and I'll try to get it resolved. Meanwhile, check the bugs page for possible solutions.

Links:

Please send email: for bug reports and comments.