"But.. why? The author had a C64 as a kid, but never got the hang of understanding proper programming until the x86 era of the 90s. This is his way of mending the hole in is soul. In addition, he hopes that he’ll get filthy rich & famous off this project.

Pricing Free of charge. How the “rich” part will be achieved is still up for debate."

Seems as valid of a business model as most I see on HN.

I know the author quite well. It all started with him following "Let’s Build A Simple Interpreter. Part 1." from Ruslan's blog (https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/) where you are creating an interpreter for a pascal like language.

He then decided to spit out some c64 assembler, and it has been a pretty cool journey after that :D

hey thanks man =) And yes, this really is how it started - with Ruslan's blog. And now, 3 years later, I've probably spent more time working on this project than I ever did on my entire education + work life combined.

Are there any issues with the performance of the compiled code compared to hand-coded assembly? I heard that 6502 and Z80 architectures are hard to target when compiling high-level language and even the best C compilers for them generate slower code than skilled assembly programmers.

My hardwired brain automatically read "Turbo Pascal".

How you can't love that trsi inspired logo? <3

Sadly, there are few people who can parse your sentence.

This is really exciting for me - just looking at the videos made me smile with nostalgia of sitting over a printed copy of Rolf Brown’s Interrupt List[0] (sorry, Mom and Dad for using so much paper) and just trying random interrupts to see what they did. Once in a while I’d even find something interesting.

I hope this can bring some of the same wonder of experimentation without immediately searching on StackOverflow. [0]: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ralf/files.html

Oh wow - that brings back memories... I had a 'VGA Bible' type book too, that was just awesome.. wish I could remember the name

Quite a nice project I was not aware of. I tried vic20 demos too and they are far decent.

Also it seems possible to create independent code at some extent at least.

This is great. Borland Object Pascal was the second language I learned in school (after Quick Basic). Along with my classmates I cobbled together a poor clone of a Might and Magic style game.

It was our instructor’s way of teaching us to collaborate and forcing us to use Clear Case on a daily basis.

I’m definitely going to keep up with this project. If only for nostalgia.

Clearcase was available at school? Not rcs/cvs? To me clearcase is one of these big, expensive, corporate tools, so I am a bit surprised.

github https://github.com/leuat/TRSE/

Is this a compiler for the Reed College Pascal variant from the '80s?

Spurious downvotes seem to suggest not.