Technical notes for developers
MIDI2TeX was originally written in Turbo Pascal. As a consequence, portabilty
was poor. I received many requests for the source. A few people have tried
to generate a more portable version but to my knowledge nobody ever came up
with a working version. I decided to do the job myself (Aug-1993).
Somebody on
the net was kind enough to pass the Pascal source code (V 1.1) through a very
good Pascal-2-C converter. That produced 95 % of the C-code. It still needed
editing to cope with pointers and the buffered IO.
One particular problem that occurred is that on the Atari ST the bytes
in an integer/longint are stacked in reverse order compared to the PC and Mac.
To solve this problem the routines ReadLongInt and ReadInteger
(in TP_M2TF4.C
) were rewritten. The proper ones may be selected by
inserting #ifdef statements.
In a joint effort with Ad Verbruggen we were able to generate
a working portable version. Exectuables have been generated on
- PC compatible (MSDOS), using Turbo-C
- Macintosh, using THINK-C
- Unix machines, C-compiler unknown
- VAX-VMS machine, C-compiler unknown
This source code is now available on the network for those who are interested
to port the C-code to other platforms.
I invite C-experts who are interested in implementing the program on
another platform to get a copy of the code and generate the executable. In
return I would like to ask to make this executable available to other
network users. Please inform me about succesfull compilation and send me back
the edited source- and make files. I'll try to glue them together to get
source which is portable to many systems.
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