sharptool page

Sharptool

You can only download a BETA version of this tool : use it if you want but remember it is not easy to use as it should be. If you're looking for a more user friendly emulator, have a look on POEM of my friend Hiroyuki KOBAYASHI.

What is sharptool ?

At the beginning, sharptool was 'only' an offline disassembler for Sharp pocket computers. Soon, I have added to capability of emulating CPU instructions and now, the final step was to add full machine emulation; Actualy, only a PC-1350 can be emulated but other machines can easily be implemented.

Compilation

sharptool needs :

any POSIX machine
(an Amiga version is planned ... but when ? ;-D)
any recent C++ compiler : the compilation was only tested with GCC but no GNUish has been used,
X window
Motif or clone of it (sharptool is known to run with Lesstif).

It was programed and tested on

an SUN Ultra 5 under Solaris 8,
an HP 715 under HP-UX 10.20 workstation (also tested under HP-UX 11.0).

To compile it, just do a make in the distribution root directory. g++ must be somewhere in your PATH.
NOTEZ BIEN : if the compilation fails at linkage stage:

Sharptool needs nanosleep() function so you may have to have to add -lrt in the Makefile inside sharptool directory. It's needed for Solaris and create an error under HP-UX, ... it's up to you to check if your OS need it.
On some systems (Linux, ...), X libraries aren't in the search path. I the compilation fails, have a look on ./sharptool/Makefile and customize the -L directive ...

Archive content

After the make stage, you will find executables in the bin/ sub directory.

Asm an old assembler written for Amiga. No documentation : have a look inside the source code (asm/ directory)
Bin2Bas convert a binary dump to a BASIC lines (again, see the source code),
Relog Change the memory address of a binary file. The binary MUST be PIC (doesn't dependant on where it's in memory) because this tools doesn't do anything about CALL or JP.
sharptool the emulator

How to use sharptool ?

For the moment, no documentation but this page.
Sharptool is basicaly a command line tool. When you launch it, it tries to open a file named '.sharptool' in your home directory. Mine is

home /home/laurent/projets/sharp @ ~/scripts/PC-1350 verbose off
The first line tell where to find data files. When you load something, a '~' is replaced by this value.
The '@' command executes a script (in my case it's /home/laurent/projets/sharp/scripts/PC-1350 : this one configure the emulation to act as an PC-1350.
At the prompt, use '?' to have the list of all known command and 'man to have a small help about a command.

Key mapping

As all sharp's key doesn't exist on a standard keyboard, the following keymapping is done :

[F1] = [CLS] [F8] = [OFF] [Esc] = [BRK] [Menu] or [Help] = [Mode]
[Tab] = [Def] ['['] = [(] [']'] = [)] [\] = [:]
and following key rise some special feature :

[F5] = Select file to load (for LOAD command, not for all versions and models)
[Print] = toggle tracing for instructions.

Name	Last modified	Size

sharptool.tgz	17-Sep-2006 15:59	113K

history

10/11/2003 - Correct incomplet keyboard driver and speedup the emulation by updating only modified memory
30/12/2002 - Linux compilation problem corrected
10/12/2002 - display indicators now works.
08/12/2002 - First public beta release (only PC-1350).

[F1] = [CLS]	[F8] = [OFF]	[Esc] = [BRK]	[Menu] or [Help] = [Mode]
[Tab] = [Def]	['['] = [(]	[']'] = [)]	[\] = [:]