NOTICE.TXT 3-OCT-2001 DISTRIBUTION POLICY AND LAST MINUTE NOTES Apex was ported from the Apple II computer to the Amiga in 1985. The Amiga version is incomplete and has many known bugs, but it runs sufficiently well so that programmers who are familiar with it can develop programs in 68000 assembly language and XPL0. Its primary appeal is that it runs very fast compared to the Apple II. Apex has seen little use since 1990. (It even has a Y2K bug!) It is made available here primarily for historical and educational purposes. Please ignore any references to "Computer Applications." It is no longer in business. DISTRIBUTION POLICY Apex and its related software are free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program (in the file LICENSE.DOC); if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. IF YOU'RE CONFUSED If you are hopelessly confused, you are perfectly normal. This version of Apex is not for you unless you are a programmer. For the assembly language programmer it provides an assembler that does only exactly what you tell it to: no automatic optimizations, no automatic PC- relative address modes. In fact, if you want, you can write self-modify- ing, position-dependent code. For the programmer who wants a higher language it provides XPL, a language with a syntax similar to Pascal and the power of C. Apex provides an efficient programming environment which compares very favorably to the most super-charged, turbo-warp systems available (by 1980's standards). Admittedly, the documentation is sketchy. The XPL Manual is not included on this disk. Perhaps whoever gave you this disk will also give you some help. Start by reading the tutorial, TUTORIAL.DOC. If you don't have the booklet, you can use the LIST command: APX>LIST 0:TUTORIAL.DOC (You can't get a good printout of this document because it contains special control characters which are only meaningful to a program called ITOPNT.) RAM DISKS Much of Apex's speed is dependant upon the use of RAM disks which are not documented in the tutorial because of an unusual problem. The tutorial refers to the floppy disks, units 0 and 1, but Apex is normally run using the RAM disks, units 2 and 3, with the system on unit 2. Unfortunately, due the Amiga 1000 hardware, unit 2 is write protected. This means that while running the system from unit 2, you cannot set the date (DATE), change the defaults (DF) or save a memory image (SAVE). This can be gotten around by temporarily transferring the system to unit 0 (SY 0). To copy a new date or default to the system RAM disk, you must reboot. XPL PROBLEMS There are a few problems with porting XPL programs into the Amiga. The biggest being that floating point is not yet working. Also there are a number of missing intrinsics such as TRAP and GETERR, which prevent utilities like SCAN and ALLDIR from being ported. The graphics intrinsics have been changed substantially to support the substantially different hardware. Finally, the language itself has changed in a number of small ways to take advantage of the 68000. (These changes are documented in XPL68K.DOC.) Loren loren_blaney@idcomm.com