archive.worldofdragon.org

Does anyone have a stack of flex disks that might have a copy of PL9 lurking in it?

Although originally by Windrush Microsystems for early 6809 flex commercial systems, a version of PL9 was resold for the Dragon by Compusense.

It's a language halfway between assembly and something like basic09 or pascal. Effectively structured assembler with floating point (and a good few other) libraries.

Not sure if you were specifically interested in the Dragon version but there is a lot of PL9 stuff here:

https://www.simonwynn.com/flex

(In fact a *LOT* of Flex images in general)

Yeah, really hoping to turn up either the Compusense sold Dragon version, or the Universal Data Research Inc corresponding CoCo one. They will no doubt have some hacks in place to deal with 'the vector problem'...

Having looked at it a little, I suspect there are enough PL9 compiler / environment sources in those archives to be able to build a Dragon / CoCo-ised version of 4.2D. But simply tracking down a Flex disk with them on would be easier!

Windrush published Mace so perhaps "PL9_MACE.DSK" would be a good place to start.

Mace was originally a Flex assembler for SWTPC and other similar traditional Flex machines, before it was ported to a Dragon Cartridge setup, so most likely that disk is simply traditional Flex machine versions of PL9 and Mace on the same development disk.