CompuServe Thread

You sound so depressed about this! There are several Pascals for the Amiga, and I'm sure some people who use them will jump right in. What do these programs do? Why have people asked for them on the Amiga? The Amiga does have several ways of emulating a PC, in hardware or software. One from Commodore is called the BridgeBoard, a hardware card that turns the Amiga 2000 into a PC that runs simultaneously with the Amiga side. Every Amiga 2000 actually has a PC bus in it, too, so you can use PC specific cards with a BridgeBoard. (The Amiga doesn't see them in practice.)

Miles – If the programs are in Turbo Pascal, I believe the new HiSoft Pascal will be the most painless way to go. I haven't yet seen it, but word is it's Turbo-compatible at least up to machine-dependent stuff. I don't know about "several Pascal" compilers – I only know of one really old commercial one and one PD (shareware?) one. I was looking very hard for one a few months back (I was porting an MSDOS program to the Amiga that was written in Turbo) and ended up doing it in Modula-2 because I couldn't find a Pascal (HiSoft hadn't been announced let alone made available at that time). Besides the language, what's needed to in order to port depends on what the program does and how. Graphics routines may need to be partially or totally rewritten, since resolutions and palettes vary between machines. Also, methods of reading the keyboard and writing to the screen are different. You'll need to choose between a CLI-type display (like native MSDOS) or using Intuition (mouse, windows, buttons, etc.). Hope this helps some. – via Whap!

If the apps are written in Turbo Pascal 5.0, or possibly even up to 6.0 w/o objects, HighSpeed Pascal from HiSoft is what you're looking for as a porting tool. It is reputed to be 99.999% compatible with TP. You could also go the "emulation" route and buy/download a software IBM emulator for the system. Then there are the bridgecards, which add an IBM clone to the inside of your Amy. Any, or all of these tricks will work. If you _must_ go bridgecard, try to see if you can sweet talk a dealer into getting the 386SX one with someone else's 3000, and then selling it to you for the price difference between the two systems, as they're not available "stand alone" yet. Brian – via Whap!

Miles, HiSpeed Pascal is a clone of Turbo Pascal 5.0 for the PC, with Amiga-specific enhancements. If your PC stuff is in TP, HiSpeed should make porting a snap. (Even if your PC stuff isn't done in TP, HiSpeed is the only decent Amiga Pascal…)