HP 9000 series 200/300 BASIC Compiler, Assembler

[Michael Fehlhammer]

Recently I acqired a liking for the early M68000 workstations like the 9836. I consider them as the powerful successors to series 80 and want to use them as HP BASIC machines only ( not PASCAL or HP-UX).
Besides using the BASIC interpreter ( ROM or disk version ), it would be nice to have a compatible compiler ( preferably version 5.1 compatible, and preferably the HP product, not third party), to gain more speed.
Does anyone have such a compiler and has used it?

Interpreted HP BASIC for these machines seem to lack support for assembler programming: There is no PEEK and POKE function nor a CALL function that transfers program execution to a machine code routine.
As far I understood from old software ads, assembler programming from a BASIC environment would require a compiler plus additional libraries for mixed language programming.
Has anyone got these tools, or even has experience in assembler programming the 200/300 series?

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

The utility for linking to compiled Pascal and assembler is called CSUBs and you need the correct version for the version of BASIC you are using. The newest one that I know of that is readily available is version 4.0. I have used it to build a CSUB from a compiled Pascal (3.1) routine. The CSUBs package consists of libraries that appear to provide the linkage for calling from BASIC. At this time it is unclear if there are substantial changes between versions or if it is just a flag in the code somewhere, but I do know a CSUB linked with the version 4 libraries will not run on version 5.1.

The assembler for these systems is part of the Pascal package, which take some getting used to as it is the whole USCD-P environment, however fortunately it generates native 68K code rather than P-code. Other useful tools in Pascal are a debugger and un-assembler.

Paul.

[Michael Fehlhammer]

Thank you Paul for your explanations concerning the CSUB library.
So it would be nice to have version 5.1 ... anyone out there who got CSUB v. 5.1?

Apart from assembler programming: If I just want to speed up my BASIC routines, created using BASIC 5.1, I would need the BASIC compiler 5.1 ( or later ), right?
Is this available anywhere?

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

There is a compiler for version 5 on http://hpmuseum.net but it is not the HP compiler. I have not tried this compiler.

[Raymond Del Tondo]

(07-13-2015 10:08 AM)Michael Fehlhammer Wrote:  Recently I acqired a liking for the early M68000 workstations like the 9836. I consider them as the powerful successors to series 80 and want to use them as HP BASIC machines only ( not PASCAL or HP-UX).
Besides using the BASIC interpreter ( ROM or disk version ), it would be nice to have a compatible compiler ( preferably version 5.1 compatible, and preferably the HP product, not third party), to gain more speed.
Does anyone have such a compiler and has used it?
Has anyone got these tools, or even has experience in assembler programming the 200/300 series?

Back then I had the BASIC 5 (or was it 5.1) Assembler Tools for the HP9000, but unfortunately I didn't find it anymore. However I found a backup copy of the HP9000 BASIC 6.0 system discs (5 diskettes: System, Binaries, Utilities, HFS Utilities, Manual Examples) . Dunno if they still work as I don't have an HP9000 anymore...
I also don't know whether the BASIC 6.0 works on a Series 200 machine, but it worked on my Series 300 Model 310 (with RAM upgrade) and up.

[Michael Fehlhammer]

(07-14-2015 08:19 AM)Raymond Del Tondo Wrote:  However I found a backup copy of the HP9000 BASIC 6.0 system discs (5 diskettes: System, Binaries, Utilities, HFS Utilities, Manual Examples) . Dunno if they still work as I don't have an HP9000 anymore...
I also don't know whether the BASIC 6.0 works on a Series 200 machine, but it worked on my Series 300 Model 310 (with RAM upgrade) and up.

Hi Ray,
I'm sure BASIC 6.0 will work on the series 200 machines as well. The latest version is 6.2, which should be compatible with the latest 300 machines ( f.e. 382, which is a 68040 powered workstation featuring an SCSI interface ) as well as with an early 9826 or 9816. At hpmuseum.net there is a link to the 6.2 version, but you'll find the documentation only, not the software. So maybe the museum might be happy to get your version 6.0.
I'd be very happy if you might stumble across the assembler tools for BASIC 5 one day. I prefer the 5.1 version over 6.x because I got the complete paper documentation for it.
Paper manuals from the good old times are so much nicer than pdfs! :-)

[rprosperi]

(07-15-2015 08:26 PM)Michael Fehlhammer Wrote:  Paper manuals from the good old times are so much nicer than pdfs! :-)

I'm so happy to see this, I thought I was the only luddite that still had a preference for real manuals. Sure the PDF is convenient and if scanned properly, the search capability is GREAT, but I still find it more satisfying to hold and use a real manual. Of course, having both is the best case, but so rare...

Are Michael and I the only ones? (I suspect not...)