Hex2 on KC85

I got my KC85 up an running with ML-DOS a CP/M 2.2 clone, it runs rather well. The main reason I wanted this is that there is a Turbo Pascal 3.3 for CP/M 2.2 Z80 (KC85 has a U880 which is a Z80 clone). I assumed that this would be much easier to use as the native KC-PASCAL which I showed before. And I was right, this feels already much more like a modern pascal. Of course there are many limitation due of age and because of limitations of 8 bit computers.

As a starter I tried to bring my Hex2 calculator, which already exists for Windows/Amiga/Linux/Mac of course here as command line tool (as I did as a starter for Amiga as well)

But that as not so easy, I was underestimating how little 64kb RAM is. This all is new for me, comparing with that even a A500 has a huge amount of memory. Here on 8bit you have to think about to put to many texts into the code, it just inflates the RAM need. I tried to optimize it a lot by keep the texts (help/error) in extra files and only load them when I need them and even use overlays but still on MicroDos I don’t get it to run, seems the program is still too big, but not sure how to solve that any further, maybe I still do something stupid there.

Nevertheless I make a first release of it 0.1 and it nearly has the same feature set as the other version, nice to have my standard tool on all platforms.

Download on KC85 Program Page