Following a suggestion on one of my recent YouTube videos I’ve been trying out Turbo Rascal Syntax Error (TRSE) for my Commodore 64 game development and first impressions are very positive. TRSE uses a Pascal style language which I have used previously at University, though I missed out on the famous Borland Turbo Pascal for the PC.
TRSE is a full integrated development environment with many helpful features to make your classic 8bit/16bit coding easier. I understand it was originally developed for C64 coding but it now supports many computer and console systems including the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Commodore Amiga and MS-DOS.
Features include inline assembly language support for when you need that extra speed, large numbers of example code, code profiler to show you which routines or data are taking up the most space and some built in editors for graphics and maps. For the C64 there is specialist support for playing music SID files, raster interrupts for split screen effects or sprite multiplexing and many other features which I’ve not had the opportunity to explore yet.
Moving from CC65 which uses the C programming language, I’ve found some of my earlier code doesn’t work as expected (even when rewritten in Pascal) but with the examples provided I’ve managed to replicate the main code fairly easily and that’s before I consider any optimisations or the use of assembly language.
You can see me using TRSE below with some rough test code for Demon’s Isle.