The PLASMA Environment has evolved: PLEIADES

(PLasma Enhanced InterActive Development EnvironmentS)

image credit: NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory

PLASMA has grown from a language compiler to a full featured interactive environment for developing and running applications on a 6502 computer. Currently the Apple // series and the Apple /// are fully supported. With the addition of FORTH and LISP to the PLASMA ecosystem as well as support for assembly programming with EDASM and even a bugfix so AppleSoft can run from the PLEIADES command line, a new designation for the expanded functionality seems in order. PLEIADES incorporates many feature improvements and bug fixes from the previous PLASMA 2.11 release. Here a some of the biggest updates:

1. Increase evaluation stack size to 32 entries for more complex algorithms
2. Support longer lines and line continuations in PLASMA compiler
3. Add 80 column (and greater) video mode to text editor and console I/O
4. Increase editor max line length to 127 characters
5. Greatly improve text loading performance of text editor
6. PLVM, the Portable PLASMA VM, now runs modules with 6502 code
7. Bug fixes and performance improvements to FORTH and LISP interpreters
8. Suite of libraries and utilities for Double Hires GRaphics development
9. Simple command file execution

The combination of all these enhancements make PLEIADES an efficient environment for programming and interacting with a 6502 computer.

Documents:

• PLASMA Language and Compiler
• PLASMA Command Line, Implementation Details and Libraries
• PLFORTH - FORTH for PLEIADES
• DRAWL - LISP 1.5 for PLEIADES
• PLEIADES Text Editor

YouTube Video Series

• Welcome to PLEIADES
• Modern Retrogramming with PLASMA
• KansasFest 2025 - DHGR image conversion in PLASMA

Disk Images:

• 140K Single Disk Bootable FORTH
• 140K Single Disk Bootable LISP
• 140K ASM Toolkit
• 140K DHGR Toolkit
• 1/6 - 140K PLEIADES Install Boot
• 2/6 - 140K PLEIADES System
• 3/6 - 140K PLEIADES Networking
• 4/6 - 140K PLEIADES Demos
• 5/6 - 140K PLEIADES Floating Point & Apple /// SOS
• 6/6 - 140K PLEIADES Build
• 32 MB PLEIADES Full Install including DHGR Toolkit
• 140K Apple /// MAME Boot
• 16 MB Apple /// MAME Hard Disk