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GRiD-OS Development Tools resurrected. Wrote UA 571-C Remote Sentry Weapon terminal display (from Aliens) as test case.

tschak909

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Well, I had to test the development environment, somehow!

Big thanks to @tr1nitr0n and @Klyball 's work, along with Mark Ogden's tireless work in archiving Intel UDI tools. It made all of this possible.

(apologies for the audio, new filter chain, and I only had time to record this ONCE)

As part of @ian Fi and myself rebuilding the GRiD Development Environment from batches of GRiD server hard drives, I needed something to test that the development environment that could compile Pascal, PL/M, Fortran, C and Assembler was working as expected. Then I thought about the sentry remote weapon system scenes that were cut from the theatrical release of James Cameron's Aliens (1986) film, which used GRiD Compass II 1129 laptops. GRiD had developed a set of working displays in GRiDBASIC for the film. These were never released, but now that the same tools are working again, I recreated them.

Video:

GitHub Here:

Release with raw Hard disk image here:

0:00 Intro
1:00 Scene from Aliens
2:27 GRiD Compass 1129
2:52 my GRiDCASE 1530, and booting into InteGRiD
4:35 UA 571-C DEMO
7:55 The GRiDDevelop Environment
8:07 The Development file
9:25 Showing PASCAL source, and talking about the code
12:30 Compiling modules
13:28 Linking UA 571-C
13:42 Testing
 
Nice job.

By the way, I never figured out how to make the MWC86 C compiler work. Seems like it lacks the standard C library and system headers?
 
Those are available on Mark Ogden's ISISmirror. That's next on my list to get working again.
I will have to write bindings for the GRiD system calls, patterned after the PL/M includes.

This has been the issue that everybody overlooked, that all of GRiD's tools and operating systems came from Intel, and Intel used a common layer for both their operating systems (ISIS-III and iRMX) and compilers (UDI), any UDI tool will work on CCOS or InteGRiD.

-Thom
 
That's Awsome!
Guess it's time to get the grid server online .
i did these almost 10 years ago now, the screen is 512x256

1139MENU.JPG1139C.JPG1139B.JPG
 
I am looking for a Compass II to try and reconstruct a CCOS version of the full development environment. I have the PL/M, Pascal, Fortran, and assembler compilers working correctly, and I should be able to reconstruct a set of bindings that can work with the MWC C compiler.

I understand the UDI underpinnings well enough to make FujiNet bindings for it, so that we can reconstruct a modern version of the GRiD network (as soon as we get a working ISA bus interface for the FujiNet)

-Thom
 
Just a small question: does someone have a 1139 or 1131 to dump ROM from? You'll need a floppy drive and an old DOS machine with 5.25" DD to read/write images onto floppies, though.
Just run program 'BIOS Dump' from this floppy image (bootable, contains minimal installation of GRiD OS 3.1.5): https://deltacxx.insomnia247.nl/gridcompass/BIOSDUMP.IMG and the image will end up in ``Programs`Bios~Binary~

You can use this thing to get out a file from the floppy disk image, then (or just give me the image of a whole floppy): https://github.com/Bs0Dd/GRiDISKCOM/releases
 
Here you go
Well, I was looking for another dump as this one seems to be of a really early version with some odd quirks related to the display - I specifically want to compare it with another dump, as there seem to be multiple different versions even on identical models
 
The ones I posted are from mine. The video addressing is non standard if that what you mean, but all compasses are that way.
 
Love this! I didn't realize before how much of the GRiD Development environment we carried over into GRiDPad, but I see very familiar function names there. The GRiDPen development system, later known as PenRight was in C, but clearly came from these Pascal roots. That split screen trick came in particularly handy on GRiDPad because we ran an emulated keyboard on the lower half while the upper half served as a regular MSDOS screen. The Bios even replicated the keyboard interrupt for better compatibility. When running GRiDPen software, we would use the full display. I'd love to resurrect the GRiDPen development system or Penright! if anyone knows where I could find the toolset.
 
@gvp We have the sources to one of the very last builds of InteGRiD, and it mostly builds using GRiDDevelop.

HOWEVER,

we are missing the various auxiliary build tools that were used to change the executable format from UDI to MS-DOS, etc.

The InteGRiD sources are attached, and would love to be able to build this, to make some much needed changes (add a VGA screen driver, maybe re-host it so it can run in 32-bit mode...)

-Thom
 

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