PX-8 and Turbo PASCAL... a bit tricky
Thursday, February 15, 2018, 02:00 PM
Posted by Administrator
I just liked to try again how it works and I tried to replaced the BASIC ROM with my Turbo PASCAL ROM, using the Turbo PASCAL version which does
not generate a BAK file (this is important because the RAM Disk has only a size between 9KB and 20KB, and if 20KB, this costs may be too much CP/M TPA space).
So I tried to generate an EPSON PX-8 ROM again, and took the utility program PROMFORM.COM - using it in my MyZ80 emulator. I had to choose 256Kx1 ROM size, and created the ROM file.
But - I forgot it generates an Intel HEX file first, so I had to convert it to a binary also.
This was stopped by the HEXBIN utility, because PROMFORM generated a correct formatted HEX file, but with a heading single empty line (not understood by HEXBIN).
After I removed the first line, it was possible to convert it to a binary 32KByte ROM file, so I was also possible to replace the BASIC ROM file successfully.
I did it first in Toshiya's HC-80 emulator (still very very useful), so I just renamed BASIC.ROM to BASIC.BAK and the TPASNOBK.ROM to BASIC.ROM.
The TPASNOBK.ROM can be downloaded from >
my Epson PX-8 page<.
This is the sample session I've done:
![](../images/px8loggeddrive.jpg)
First step is set your drive you want to save the source (with "L" for "Logged Drive").
If you don't do this, you can't save the source...
![](../images/px8editsource.jpg)
Now enter something useful (this is just a demo source without any further purpose) ...
![](../images/px8compile.jpg)
See how much (memory) space was consumed ... Turbo PASCAL is very efficient ...
![](../images/px8running.jpg)
It's running ;-)