Tux Machines

Old Vintage Computing Research: Plua 2 continued: open source under GPL for your classic Palm

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 04, 2022

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More good news for classic PalmOS development. In previous articles, I've introduced you to Plua, a PalmOS 3.5 native version of Lua 5.0.3. By generous permission of Marcio Migueletto de Andrade, its original developer, we already have a 64-bit fixed open source version of the "cross-compiler" plua2c, which we use to build Overbite Palm.

Well, Marcio has uploaded the source code for Plua 2.0 itself, which I have patched up to build on my Power Mac G5. This is really great to see because now the runtime can be updated with more features and for more devices, particularly the wide-screen AlphaSmart dana.

I can't advise you currently on how to build on other platforms, but I will point out that prc-tools is quite old and you really need a 32-bit host (or at least one that can run 32-bit binaries) to make this work. My G5 under Mac OS X Tiger fills this bill: even though it's a 64-bit CPU, it runs 32-bit software without comment. I also tested these build instructions on my iMac G4 that doesn't even have Xcode, and it builds out of the box there too. So here's how to do it on your Power Mac and those of you on x86 (or a compatible x86_64 operating system) can install the analogous packages for your platform. It may also work under Rosetta for Intel users on 10.4-10.6 (sorry, Apple silicon, you'll probably need to do this in QEMU or UTM).

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