I've just released v0.3.3 of Pygenda - my WIP #Psion-inspired agenda app for keyboard-equipped mobile linux devices. Main change is to move to more modern packaging, which should mean less fiddly installation & less work for me. So in theory a good time to try it out.
I've just released v0.3.2 of Pygenda - my #Psion-inspired agenda app for keyboard-equipped Linux PDAs. If you're not sure what that would look like, here's a video of an earlier version running on my #GeminiPDA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvQqFmlZ6nM
Main changes since the last release:
• An import function, so you can import entries from iCal files.
• Dutch translations - thanks to Heimen Stoffels, a freelance translator: https://github.com/Vistaus
I'm in the mood to try to get more old #Psion software open sourced. If you can think of any old apps that you used on your Series 3a (or Series 5/Revo, but you all know I'm more of a SIBO/EPOC16 fan) that you remember fondly, I'll see if I can track the developer(s) down.
This is really exciting for me, because it's now very likely that I'll be able to bring a working 4MB #Psion Series 3mx to the Festival of Portable Computing in #Cambridge next month. As far as I know, it'll be the only one in the world!
▶️ #CTRAN: A drop-in FOSS replacement for CTRAN.EXE, the #Psion SIBO/EPOC16 OO C preprocessor on #DOS. Almost feature complete, but still work to do!
▶️ #ObjectPascal with #FreePascal: Used for CTRAN for easy development and portability. Honestly, I'm really enjoying it; it fits my needs and makes my brain happy.
▶️ RAM upgrade for 3mx to 4MB: Trying to source old DRAM isn't easy.
▶️ RAM upgrade for 5mx: Got the DRAM. Just need to solder it in place.
It's official! I'll be at the Festival of Portable Computing on the 18th and 19th of May, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, showing off my collection of Psion kit.
The collection has grown since last year, so let's see what I can fit on a table! 😂
I've also got a small collection of non-Psion kit in various states of disrepair, so I'll bring those too.
With ASIC9 machines (3a, 3c, 3mx, Siena, Workabout), RAM above 384K is paged in in 64K banks. The newly added 2MB is in banks 0x20-0x3F.
There are definite similarities in what's stored in 0x20-0x23, with some bytes just having one bit flipped. It then changes again for 0x24-0x27, 0x28-0x2B, 0x2C-0x2F. For all of those, the 4 high bits are predominantly on, and the 4 low bits predominantly off.
I've found a website belonging to a small IT company in the UK. The site hasn't been updated in a long time, but it says that they have (had) over 200 of a 3mx-compatible DRAM chip in stock.
According to Companies House, the company is still active.
I've emailed them.
If nothing else, they might be able to tell me what equipment that DRAM chip went into. If I'm lucky, it's cheap and there are loads of them.
Just tried compiling Wari, a game written in #Psion OO C. The project uses #Borland Make 3.6.
Got it to compile first time with my SIBO SDK setup - all good!
However... Borland Make uses 16-bit DPMI, and its extender won't load 32-bit DPMI binaries. If I pre-load the 32-bit extender, it won't load 16-bit DPMI binaries, so Make won't run!
TL;DR: I can't use the new #ctran with Borland Make 3.6.
Looks like I'll be converting that Makefile to GNU Make or a #TopSpeed project.
Modifying the old #Borland makefile to work with #GNU make went well! It mostly required replacing double-spaces with tabs, escaping backslashes, and switching the wildcard syntax to something more modern.
As a result, Wari now compiles on the #Psion SIBO C SDK with GNU Make for DOS! I wonder if the developer would appreciate a pull request?
So... Does it compile with my new version of #ctran? Well...
Does anyone know if there's much of a difference between #Borland MAKE files and #GNU MAKE files?
There's an old #Psion project on GitHub that uses Borland MAKE as part of its build process. I was thinking of migrating it to GNU MAKE (on DOS) to remove a proprietary dependency.
If I want to have any hope of learning to write #EPOC16 device drivers in the future, I'm going to need to learn x86 (specifically 8086 and NEC V30) assembly.
That is DEFINITELY not a Today Problem. It's not even a This Year Problem.
I wonder if it's worth making a little interface using #FreeVision (the #TurboVision-compatible library that comes with #FreePascal) to display information about #Psion OO category (class definition) files?
Yes, I realise this is feature creep. But currently I'm outputting a lot of information to the terminal that the original CTRAN.EXE doesn't do. How much do I leave in as a "verbose" option, and how much to I move to a shiny TUI?
Done a lot of work on #ctran tonight. In fact, I think we might have a working parser! I definitely need to check over what I've done, but it's looking promising.
I need to add more checks to make sure that tokens don't appear in files that aren't meant to have them (e.g. DECLARE should only be in .EXT files). Then I need to test that the tree is being built the way I think it is.
After that, it's time to do something with EXTERNALs and REQUIREs to make MANY trees.