Note: probably 99% of this tutorial (excluding installation and folder structure) is DOSBox- and not Mac-specific. As long as your computer can run DOSBox you should be able to convert the steps to work on Windows.
DOS apps don't run natively on OS X, so we use DOSBox to emulate DOS for us.
Navigate to the official DOSBox download page and select the latest Mac OS X version (at the time of writing this is for DOSBox 0.74). It will kick you over to SourceForge where your download will start after a couple of seconds.
Go to where you saved the DOSBox disk image to (for me it's the Downloads directory) and double click it to mount it.
Finder should automatically reveal the contained filesystem, however if it doesn't just double click the appropriate icon in the Finder sidebar.
If you want more details on how DOSBox works,
feel free to open the ReadMe.txt file, but for now just drag the
DOSBox.app into your /Applications directory. If you are having trouble
finding this, just click the Finder icon in your Dock, hit ⌘⇧G,
enter /Applications in the modal that appears and then press ⏎ (Return).
Without TurboPascal we'd just have a DOS terminal. Such fun.
Because TurboPascal is so old, it was actually quite difficult finding the binaries for it. These from borlandc.org work for me but if you have different binaries that you'd prefer using then go right ahead.
To use TurboPascal we need to "install" it. You could use any location on your filesystem for TurboPascal but I tend to place these things in my home directory so I can find them easily.
But first, extract the pascal.zip that you downloaded from borlandc.org.
The resulting directory should be called TP.
I renamed it to TurboPascal because that way it's easier to know what it is.
On UNIX-like systems the home directory is where everything specific
to you goes. The path varies from Mac to Mac, depending on your setup
(my home directory is on a separate hard drive), so if you don't know
where your home directory is: move the focus to Finder (by selecting
Finder in the Dock) and press ⌘⇧G. In the resulting modal, just
enter ~ and press ⏎ (Return).
Copy or cut your TurboPascal over to your home directory, such that
the resulting path is ~/TurboPascal. This'll be important later.
Now that TurboPascal is installed, it's time to fire up DOSBox.
You'll have to "mount" your current Mac filesystem by assigning it to a drive letter.
First we'll mount TurboPascal. I chose A as the drive letter, but you could choose anything.
for any of the following, type only what is after the > sign
Z:\>mount A ~/TurboPascal/BINNext we'll mount the rest of our home directory so that we can open and save a file within TurboPascal. You can also mount a specific directory if you'd prefer not navigating a large file tree.
Z:\>mount C ~
Z:\>C:The first of these commands mounts your home directory (~) as the C drive. The second changes the
current drive to your home directory. We'll change the working directory
of TurboPascal so that navigating the file structure isn't such a pain
and so that all files TurboPascal generates for your project stay in
one location.
Alternatively you could also mount C /, but this is not recommended (you don't want to give
an ancient operating system permission to potentially overwrite OS X).
Where you place your projects is up to you. I ran these commands to create a directory within my home directory dedicated to Pascal projects:
C:\>mkdir PASPRO
C:\>cd PASPROThis tutorial assumes your current directory is C:\PASPRO.
You have several choices now. You can either use the "blue window" TurboPascal that we use at College or you can use an external editor. I'll cover both.
To start "blue window" TurboPascal, run the following:
C:\PASPRO>A:\TPX.EXETa da!
Actually we're not quite done yet: you may notice that you can't move your mouse cursor. I've found that double clicking the blue area of the window makes DOSBox capture your mouse cursor, but if it does not you may need to press CTRL+F10 (CTRL+Fn+F10 if F10 mutes your Mac). Performing this shortcut again releases the mouse as well.
Now you can write code :D
You'll also find all your code and .exe files in ~/PASPRO. Neat.
If you'd prefer using an external editor such as GitHub Atom or Sublime Text (use 3, it supports Pascal highlighting) then… follow along.
Make changes to your .PAS files with your editor of choice. When it comes to running, you will have to
invoke the compiler manually.
C:\PASPRO>A:\TPC.EXE HIWORLDIn this case HIWORLD refers to your code file, HIWORLD.PAS (or whatever it may be). The compiler is smart
enough to know that they end in .PAS and will compile it to a .EXE file called HIWORLD.EXE.
If it compiles successfully you'll see something like this:
If it doesn't, the output will usually tell you the error and the line it ocurred on.
Assuming you have compiled your program in a similar matter, you can run your application without adding .EXE to the end.
C:\PASPRO>HIWORLDI actually tend to create small batch files that compile the program and then run it. One of these may be called CR.BAT (CR = Compile Run) and look like this.
A:\TPC.EXE HIWORLD
HIWORLDIf you have this kind of setup you can edit your code and compile+run it by just running CR.
Of course you don't want to type all these things every time you start DOSBox. If you want your DOSBox to launch just like it does at College you'll have to add the commands you wish to run to the DOSBox configuration file.
The file we'll be editing is ~/Library/Preferences/DOSBox 0.74 Preferences you can either directly edit
it by opening a terminal and typing
open -e ~/Library/Preferences/DOSBox\ 0.74\ Preferencesor you can click Finder in the dock, press ⌘⇧G, enter ~/Library/Preferences, press ⏎ (Return), and double click the file
entitled DOSBox 0.74 Preferences.
Once you've opened the DOSBox configuration file, scroll to the bottom to find [autoexec] and add your startup
lines below this.
If you've followed the tutorial fully, something like this will make DOSBox mount the correct directories,
change directory to our project directory (PASPRO), and finally execute TPX, the TurboPascal Integrated
Development Environment (IDE).
mount A ~/TurboPascal/BIN
mount C ~
C:
cd PASPRO
A:\TPX.EXE
Thanks for reading. Hopefully it helped those who couldn't get TurboPascal running on their Mac (or on Windows).
© 2014 Niklas Vangerow
Thank you, but the Link to the TurboPascal binaries heads to porn