Portable Patmos is a BSD unix program environment. The advantages of this are that you can compile almost all BSD or GNU software including C and C++ without modifying the source code in any way. The original Patmos ran in protected mode, the preferred method for debugging, but for greater portability this version has been slimmed down to run on any 68020+ mac or powermac (I hope). It still is not compatible with virtual memory because it captures certain exceptions and trap vectors for supervisor use. If you try to start in VM mode you will get an explanatory message and the program will exit. To keep archive size down only the bare minimum to get going is included. This consists of the shell, the C compiler/assembler/linker, the automated build utility (make) and a few utilities.
Start your program by opening 'sh' in the root directory. You can open new windows at any time using the open menu or by drag and drop. The location of the file you dropped becomes the root directory for that session.
You can make a standalone program by pasting the Patmos-univ application resources into the resource fork of your executable program.
In theory you can also make standalone mac applications but this is more difficult and not covered in this release.
If you are unfamiliar with the usage of the GNU software, all the source code and manual pages and documentation should be available from the same site you got Patmos from, as well as many other places. The most convenient way to get new source code to compile and run is on the many CDroms that are available. You can get BSD software on CDrom or via ftp as well.
Noddy Usage guide.
You can prepare your source code with an editor such as the freeware BBEdit-2.2.2, be sure to choose the ‘UNIX line endings’ option when you save the source file. A typical compilation command would be
gcc plugh.c where plugh.c is your program
this will generate an executable in the current directory, called a.out by default
Run this program by typing
a.out
The program’s output will appear in the console window.
The majority of recent mac
models use a cut down 68LC040 or powermac-emulator with no maths co-processor so the kernel
and most programs assume the co-processor is unused. You could alter
the kernel to save the FPU context if you have a full 68040 and this would
then work in conjunction with gcc -m68040. You might need to edit the gcc specs
