9 May
2005
9 May
'05
8:57 a.m.
From: "Allison" <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net>
Decmate II/III uses 6120 (PDP-8 with EMA). There is
no *nix for the PDP-8
and OS278 is common. FYI: VMS runs on VAX(32bit) and Alpha(64bit).
If you can fit the game format into a 32Kword 12bit machine it's possible.
Generally speaking there isn't a C compiler for PDP-8 I know of and the
4k paged addressing and very minimalist instruction set would be an
interesting challenge. I've seen Fortan, Focal, Basic and even algol
on an 8 but never C.
I don't expect to ever see a true C compiler for the PDP-8. The lack of
stacks, etc. are easily gotten around, but the 12 bit word size isn't. On a
PDP-8, a short (or a pointer, for that matter) would have to be 2 words (and
a long would be 3). The C data types just don't fit efficiently into 12 bit
words. So writing a C compiler would be difficult, and the resulting code
would be horrible (at least by PDP-8 standards) :-).
Now a "C-like" language, with 12-bit shorts and ints, would be kinda cool.
(To generate efficient code, it would likely need to have something like
"near" and "far" pointers, though.)
Vince