I have made some progress!! (of a sort...)

Download as self extracting StuffIt.

I have fleshed out the user interface. I have the skeletons for handling the menus. Next I need to start adding the code to talk on the serial port and make the window do something useful. I also need to figure out what to do with the preferences. Should I save them to a preferences file or store them in the program like old school apps used to do? Oh well, I will decide later. If anyone wants to play with it be my guest. It doesn't do anything at the moment, so you will not get far. I will update here and on the RetroChallenge BBS when I need testers. I will try to make this as generic as possible so that anyone with a serial only retro computer can find it useful.

I am using the book "Macintosh Pascal Programming Primer" to get this going. Thus far I have mostly modified the examples from the book. I'm not blindly copying though, it is mostly making sense to me. I am also, for better or worse, picking up the coding style used in the book. I'm thinking of going back and changing all of my resource IDs to start from 400 instead of the system default of 128. I'm skipping around in the book, so I have yet to encounter their reason for starting at 400 for resource IDs. It seems like a rather odd choice to me...

I have been a VIM user for many many years. And I must say the ThinkPascal interface is quite nice. I don't care too much for some of the Mac editing oddities due to being used to VI/VIM though. Regardless that is the sort of programming interfaces I wish I could get other places. All I have to do is type, I don't even have to hit return very often. ThinkPascal reformats everything as I go. It is a rather pleasant experience and allows me to concentrate on what I am doing instead of nitpicking the formatting.

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Hand coded by a nerd...