{ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: THESE MATERIALS are UNSUPPORTED by OSS! If you do not understand how to use them do not contact OSS for help! We will not teach you how to program in Pascal. If you find an error in these materials, feel free to SEND US A LETTER explaining the error, and how to fix it. THE BOTTOM LINE: Use it, enjoy it, but you are on your own when using these materials! DISCLAIMER: OSS makes no representations or warranties with respect to the contents hereof and specifically disclaim all warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. This document is subject to change without notice. OSS provides these materials for use with Personal Pascal. Use them in any way you wish. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- } Using Personal Pascal With a Ramdisk So you say you want to use a ramdisk with your Personal Pascal Compiler on a 520ST? Well, before you go rushing off to try it, here are a few pointers. You might think you could just set up a 360K ramdisk, copy the whole Personal Pascal disk onto it, and be ready to go. After all, you have 512K of memory in your 520ST, don't you? Naturally, it is not as simple as it sounds. Personal Pascal requires about 160K of working or "free" memory to properly compile most programs. The GEM Desktop eats up about 100K of memory for its own purposes. So there goes 260K of precious memory right off the bat. And to make matters worse, the PASCAL.PRG shell uses about 35K of memory on top of it all. This means that you must leave about 300K of memory free when you set up the ramdisk. If you are using any desk accessories, this will reduce the amount of memory available to the system. Assuming no desk accessories, you should be able to set up a 200K ramdisk with no problem. If you have desk accessories, you might want to try a 150K ramdisk. Now that you have your ramdisk ready to go, how can it be used to reduce wear and tear on your disk drives? Well, you can put your source code on the ramdisk. This will help somewhat, but will require accesses to the disk drive to load the editor, the compiler, the linker, and the libraries. We recommend that you use a ramdisk of 150K to 200K and put your source code along with the Pascal libraries on the ramdisk. This will have the most dramatic effect during linking, as the linker is the most disk-bound program. The only problem is that the linker expects to find the library files PASLIB and PASGEM on the disk that you ran PASCAL.PRG from. Since this will be either drive A or B, just copying the library files to the ramdisk will have no effect. What we need to do is tell Personal Pascal to use the library files on the ramdisk. Before starting, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make a backup copy of your MASTER Personal Pascal Disk. We don't want you to make any changes to the original. Use the backup copy when you follow these instructions! Now we can present the patented nine step process for setting up Personal Pascal to use the library files on the ramdisk. 1. Rename PASLIB and PASGEM to PASLIB.O and PASGEM.O on your diskette. This can be done in the GEM desktop by clicking once on PASLIB and choosing "SHOW INFO" in the FILES menu of GEM. You will see a dialog box with a whole bunch of information. Press the period key <.> then type the letter O (not zero), then press the key. Repeat the same process for PASGEM. 2. Enter Personal Pascal, and edit a file called NULL.PAS. Type in the following lines: {$M+} PROGRAM NULL; BEGIN END. and press the key. 3. Select the "Linker Options" in the "Options" menu and in the "Additional Link Files" box type the line: D:PASGEM,D:PASLIB where D: is whatever drive code you have assigned to your ramdisk. WARNING: If you are compiling programs for TOS, you must not use PASGEM in the additional link files. Linking PASGEM with a TOS program will cause countless headaches. 4. Enter select the "Compiler Options" dialog box and enter D: into the "Temporary Directory" line. 5. Having done this, select "Save Options..." in the "Options" menu to save these modifications. 6. Set your compiler options so that the compiler DOES NOT CHAIN to the linker, then compile NULL.PAS. Assuming no errors during compilation, select "Quit" from the "Files" menu, and return to the GEM desktop. 7. Select (click on) the file called NULL.O. Select SHOW INFO from the FILE menu, press the key, and type in the name PASLIB. Hit . 8. Make a copy of this new PASLIB (by dragging PASLIB onto the same window). When you see the "NAME CONFLICT" dialog box, press and type in the name PASGEM and press . 9. Go out and celebrate!! You have successfully set up Personal Pascal to use your ramdisk. Now, when you want to use your ramdisk, you will have to copy your Pascal source code, along with the files PASLIB.O and PASGEM.O onto the ramdisk before compiling and linking, but the speed improvement should be well worth the effort.