Re: GNO...

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Rob Greene wrote:

> 1. Do the Merlin tools work from the command line?  How?  I see how to
> get MD Basic working.  Is there any way to run a BASIC program from from
> GNO?

You have to have ORCA/C I'm afraid...

One interesting alternative would be to see if (or modify) the cc65
cross compiler to compile itself. If you can do that, then combined
with an OMF linker (which you'd have to write) you'd then have an open
solution to the problem. Now, I'm not suggesting cc65 will compile
itself, but it did once run on the Atari ST so the machine size it was
designed for is at least similar.

> 2. What are the real memory requirements?  I'm currently sitting at
> 1.25MB and I think I'm at the edge.  I tried "awk -?", but it never
> printed an error or came back, so I have a hunch I went over... man pages
> don't work... anything that seems to have any memory needs seem to fail.

That's probably an inconclusive test - awk interpreters don't typically
accept such an option and the GNO implementation might be expecting a
script in stdin.

> 5. Anything interesting going on with GNO?  Or is it pretty much dead?

The lack of an available compiler is the big issue, since it prevents
easily porting of applications. The other problem is that a large
volume of available C code will incorrectly assume that int == 32 bits
and also (even worse) assume sizeof(int) == sizeof(int*). On a 65816
both of those are untrue so a lot of massaging will be necessary to get
things running.

Matt