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Socoder -> Retro Coding -> Amstrad CPC support (and zx spectrum, Atari ST and others) in Turbo Rascal

Thu, 27 Aug 2020, 08:18
AndyH

Amstrad CPC support (and zx spectrum, Atari ST and others) in Turbo Rascal


You may or may not know that I contribute to Turbo Rascal, particularly the Vic 20 side but not exclusively.

Turbo Rascal is a development environment that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, to create predominantly 8-bit but also 16-bit software.

Well some huge leaps have been made to the systems that Rascal supports and I’m hoping I could tempt some of the people who hang around these parts to get involved.

There is Gameboy support in rascal, which uses a type of z80. My constant pestering of Leuat (the author) has paid off and we now have Amstrad CPC support. The cpc was my second home computer and I’ve been wanting to make something on it for a long time.

It’s frontier days, Lots of things to add, bugs to fix etc but you can point it to Caprice and build (assemble) directly to memory in the emulator and see your program running very quickly. There is an example project with the basics and some impressive first steps with images, plotting etc. The image editor supports the Amstrad (certainly mode 0, possibly 1 and 2 also) and things have moved along some way.

The best part, and maybe this is the bit you can help with, is we have started to use Units to implement commands for each platform rather than in the language, which means the code is Rascal and you can quickly and easily view it, change it and add to it. Granted, much of the code in the units will be Z80 assembler for the low level stuff, but they are small parts that come together to hopefully make an easy to use, powerful programming environment for the Amstrad. So if you have some experience of the cpc, or even if you just want to tinker and learn, We could really like your help and contributions. I’m relearning everything I once knew about the Amstrad too.

With z80 support this also opens the door to the Zx Spectrum.

And...

Leuat is currently focusing on Atari ST support, currently writing a demo for the machine using Rascal so there is a lot of new features coming in daily for that platform.

You can get the latest snapshot in a zip from www.turborascal.com and from github, including the full source code and latest build. I can help if having any problems getting going with turbo rascal or if any questions.

Hopefully this will be of interest to some of us here

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Andy H
8-bit games at www.hewco.uk
Cartoons at awful.ovine.net
Ovine at ovine.net
Thu, 27 Aug 2020, 08:22
Jayenkai
Sounds good.
Might have to try that out.
Mmmm...

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Thu, 27 Aug 2020, 08:23
AndyH
Oh we have a Facebook group that is easy to find and a Slack channel that is very active and perfect to get help with rascal.

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Andy H
8-bit games at www.hewco.uk
Cartoons at awful.ovine.net
Ovine at ovine.net
Thu, 27 Aug 2020, 08:24
Jayenkai
Website?

|update| found on github, added links to your post, hope you don't mind. |update|

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Thu, 27 Aug 2020, 08:29
AndyH
I’ll let him know. Can get to it on github here, there should be a link to the latest release in a zip so you don’t have to worry about building it.

https://github.com/leuat/TRSE

|update| -=-=- |update|
Cool, yes no problem.

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Andy H
8-bit games at www.hewco.uk
Cartoons at awful.ovine.net
Ovine at ovine.net
Thu, 27 Aug 2020, 08:39
AndyH
Oh I seem to be a bit ahead, the latest zip does not yet include the Amstrad stuff yet, but I can build a version for anyone interested. Or you can install QT and stuff and build the latest from github ...

Leave it with me, I will post a link to a windows build tonight after work.

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Andy H
8-bit games at www.hewco.uk
Cartoons at awful.ovine.net
Ovine at ovine.net
Thu, 27 Aug 2020, 09:14
Jayenkai
I'll likely give it a go over December, during the Advent of Creativity.
Sounds like something that might go well with it.

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