• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

aim65 pascal roms

delo

Member
Joined
Oct 1, 2010
Messages
10
Hi I'm John from italy
Does anyone of this forum have a copy of the pascal roms
of the aim65?
I have one of this old board and like to try it.
I saw some time ago about 30 years ago a manual of
this that I remenber as an interpreter?!

bye
delo
 
Hi I'm John from italy
Does anyone of this forum have a copy of the pascal roms
of the aim65?
I have one of this old board and like to try it.
I saw some time ago about 30 years ago a manual of
this that I remenber as an interpreter?!

bye
delo
The only language ROMs for the AIM65 I'm aware of are BASIC, Forth, PL/65 and of course assembler, all of which can be found on the Web; where did you hear that there was a Pascal set?
 
I've got some old Rockwell product literature that mentions Pascal as well. I don't have it at hand or I'd post the details. But it existed.
 
Hi
I have the PROMs. They are labled R32P2 through R32P6. There are 5 proms all together.
I just dug then out from a note from the OP.
Dwight
 
Hi
I can read them but need to make an adapter to
use my programmer. They are almost identical to
a 2732 but two of the wires need to be dealt with.
A11 is on the wrong pin and another needs to
be tied to ground.
Its not hard to do, just need to do it.
Dwight
 
Any results?

The strange thing about AIM65 Pascal is that even the PASCAL manual(s) cannot be found on the net.
I can confirm that there were advertisements in the 80's, however noone (from my former AIM65 users
group) nor any other recent senior colleague had ever seen PASCAL running on the AIM65..

Subitus
 
I suspect that one of the reasons that there is so little info about AIM65 PASCAL is that it required an expansion unit, so like all the other add-ons it would have been relatively rare.

Dwight was kind enough to dump the ROMs and send me the images; I've never gotten around to doing anything with them but I'll gladly pass them on if he doesn't chime in. BTW, they are numbered 2 to 6, which suggests that maybe one (or more) may be missing.
 
Dwight Elvey wrote:
>> They are labled R32P2 through R32P6.
MikeS wrote:
>> they are numbered 2 to 6, which suggests that maybe one (or more) may be missing.
Probably an abbreviation for "R32P?" !?
>> required an expansion unit
Hmm... 5 ROMs perfectly fit into the AIM65 "motherboard"...

Subitus
 
@MikeS: Merci!

An analysis with due diligence yields the following hypothesis:
R32P2 is located at $4000
R32P3 is located at $5000
R32P4 is unfortunately unkown as it seems to contain syntax tables,
however a good guess might be $6000
R32P5 is located at $7000

R32P6 is located at $B000

I used the dcc6502 disassembler looking at the absolute JSR calls
in the dumps of the ROMs and the above guess made sense in respect
to the locations called, thus the mnemonics at these locations
looked good and a RTS (or a JMP) was in a nearby location...

I don't know yet if the collection is complete as I saw *a few*
calls to $2xxx and $3xxx. However these might have been a
disassembly side effect of data.

A (Unix) strings(1) command on the images yields:
INSTANT PASCAL(TM)
(C)1981 MELVIN E. CONWAY

No manuals yet :-( An a simple replacement of the AIM65 ROMs
won't work as guessed before...

-Subitus
 
I have copies...yes a few...of the manual and I have a copy of the five ROMs in 2532 EPROMs but the legs have rotted off the chips in places due to moisture in the static foam. I am trying to solder them into sockets so I can insert them into an AIM65 and burn new images with my programmer. From MikeS post, he is correct about the location in the memory map. I had my set running on my AIM back in the 1980s but am not certain if they will still work. Has anyone found the images online? Dave
 
I suspect that one of the reasons that there is so little info about AIM65 PASCAL is that it required an expansion unit, so like all the other add-ons it would have been relatively rare.

Dwight was kind enough to dump the ROMs and send me the images; I've never gotten around to doing anything with them but I'll gladly pass them on if he doesn't chime in. BTW, they are numbered 2 to 6, which suggests that maybe one (or more) may be missing.

MikeS, can you send me the images? See my post above. Have you gotten them into EPROMs yet? I will scan the manual and post it online...the only spot I have is on my website www.originalwoodworks.com

Dave orgwood@iaxs.net
 
MikeS, can you send me the images? See my post above. Have you gotten them into EPROMs yet? I will scan the manual and post it online...the only spot I have is on my website www.originalwoodworks.com

Dave orgwood@iaxs.net
No problem; they should be in your inbox by now. No, I didn't burn them because I assume they are located in the RAM area so I'd have to make a little expander/adapter to put a ROM socket there.

I do have one of the 40KB RAM versions of the AIM65, so maybe I'll try loading the images into RAM one of these days, especially if you make the manual available on line ;-)

Nice to meet another AIM65'er ;-)

mike
 
Here I Am

Here I Am

Some info here:
http://heed.melconway.com/HEED/History.html

Maybe Mel has some more info; who wants to contact him?

I have almost no hard copy from the time I built AIM65 Instant Pascal for Rockwell, but here is the first page of the final symbol table listing from the Rockwell 6502 development system. Maybe this will answer some questions. (The whole listing exceeds the forum's file size limit.)

PINT-Pascal interpreter, executed the tokens
MOTT-MOTTLE (Mel's Own Tiny Threaded Language Engine). In order to save space I built the source code parser using an 8-bit pseudocode interpreter I invented for the purpose. Interestingly, this made its way into Mac Pascal, Apple II Instant Pascal, and the real Pascal compiler we (Think Technologies) later built for the Mac.
CLI- Probably the command language interpreter (note the patch list at the bottom of the listing)
LIST-Lister, the inverse of COMP. Turned tokens into readable Pascal.
BIND-Binder, a fast pass over the tokens after you say "run" that fixes up forward references
COMP-Compiler, the Pascal parser and source-to-token translator (this is a guess)
FLOP-Probably the floating-point package supplied by Rockwell
A65M-Probably the Aim65 monitor (bare-bones OS) supplied by Rockwell.

The article at http://heed.melconway.com/HEED/History.html explains some of these terms.
 

Attachments

  • Memory Map.pdf
    16.5 KB · Views: 6
I have almost no hard copy from the time I built AIM65 Instant Pascal for Rockwell, but here is the first page of the final symbol table listing from the Rockwell 6502 development system. Maybe this will answer some questions. (The whole listing exceeds the forum's file size limit.)...
Hi Mel, and welcome! Always a delight to meet an author from 'the old days'.

Unfortunately this thread has become split, and there's more discussion about installing your Pascal here:
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?27237-Rockwell-AIM-65-(R6500)

FWIW I tried loading the low part into the RAM of a 40kB AIM without much success, but I might have missed something in the conversion somewhere and haven't looked into it yet; I'll report back when I've had some time to explore further.
 
Got it working!

Got it working!

Had another go at loading Pascal in the AIM65 and this time it worked; at least I got the opening dialogue, didn't try much else. Will have to peruse the manual.

I have a late model Dynatem AIM65 with 40kB of RAM; I put a ROM into it which contains all four languages (Pascal (B ROM), BASIC, Forth and PL/65) in one 27256 with a switch to select the one you want, and loaded the lower part of Pascal into RAM as a file.

I've mentioned Jim Brain's stuff before in connection with this "Combo ROM" and other places as well, but I'm going to give him another plug:

For about $5.00 ($1.50 if you want to assemble it yourself) you get a small adapter board that can replace a 24-pin 4kB 2532 (as used in the AIM, some PETs, etc.) or a 24-pin 8kB ROM as used in C64s, IBM PCs etc. etc. with a standard 2764 to 27512 EPROM with provisions for manual bank switching (the 4 pads in front):

2364a.JPG

If you don't mind using two then that's all you need for the AIM: one in the B socket and one in the C socket, each one with a 27128 containing the 4 respective images, with a switch or jumpers to select the one you want.

I preferred to have all 8 images (7 actually since Pascal only uses 4kB) so I made another adapter to plug into the Brain adapter which combines the B and C chip selects and selects the appropriate image; no mods to the 40kB AIM required, but if you've got a 4K model you'd have to add a pin for the 'C' chip select (and of course you'd have to work out something for the low-memory Pascal code).

AimAdapt2.JPG Aimadapt1.JPG

Kinda hard to show it on the one-line display, so here's how all 5 (including the Assembler which is on its own ROM) look on a terminal, just switching the DIP switch each time to select the next language:
--------------------------------
DYNATEM AIM 65


<5>MEMORY SIZE? 4096
WIDTH? 80

AIM 65 PASCAL V1.0
+<>?
+<>?
<

-----------------------
<5>
MEMORY SIZE?
WIDTH?

40430 BYTES FREE

AIM 65 BASIC V1.1

? "HELLO"
HELLO

-----------------------
<
<5>
AIM 65 PL/65 V1.0
IN= OUT=

PASS(1 OR 2)?
-----------------------
<
<5>
AIM 65 FORTH V1.3
OK
OK
-----------------------
<
<N>
ASSEMBLER
FROM=0006 TO=5CA3
IN=
LIST?
LIST-OUT=

OBJ?
PASS 1

------

Waddya think, Mel? Bet ya haven't seen that for a while... ;-)
 
Last edited:
MikeS, your Pascal shows over 40KB free...does the Pascal memory test overwrite itself in the $4000-7FFF block? Dave
 
MikeS, your Pascal shows over 40KB free...does the Pascal memory test overwrite itself in the $4000-7FFF block? Dave
I wanted to show that it went from one language to another just by changing the switch but I should have put separators in there to make it clearer.

You have to read down from the <5> that starts each session, so the 40kB is BASIC's free memory; Pascal's default is 4kB.

I went back up and added those lines in my previous post to separate the different sessions.
 
A blast from the past!

A blast from the past!

Had another go at loading Pascal in the AIM65 and this time it worked; at least I got the opening dialogue, didn't try much else. Will have to peruse the manual.

I have a late model Dynatem AIM65 with 40kB of RAM; I put a ROM into it which contains all four languages (Pascal (B ROM), BASIC, Forth and PL/65) in one 27256 with a switch to select the one you want, and loaded the lower part of Pascal into RAM as a file.

...

------

Waddya think, Mel? Bet ya haven't seen that for a while... ;-)

You're right. This is a strange land, 30 years later.

BTW, the genealogy of this design is:
1. AIM65 Instant Pascal (1981)
2. The same code I put on an Apple II ROM board we showed to the Mac development team in 1982.
3. Mac Pascal, based on the same internal design plus a brand new user interface, recoded for the 68000. 1984.
4. A real Pascal for the Macintosh.
5. Apple II Instant Pascal, designed to look like Mac Pascal, including mouse and drop-down menus.
3,4, and 5 were built by Think Technologies, Inc., a company we started in order to build Mac Pascal for Apple.
 
Back
Top