Copyright (C) 2003-2006 Tecgraf, PUC-Rio.
Copyright (C) 2001-2022 Marcio Migueletto de Andrade.
Copyright (C) 2022 Cameron Kaiser.
All rights reserved.
Licensed under the GNU Public License v3 (see LICENSE).
Plua is a port of Lua 5.0.3 to classic Palm OS (3.5 or later) with special on-board support for the Palm Pilot hardware, including graphics, sound, UI and networking. For more about Plua, including full documentation, see Plua Revisited.
This is the source code for the onboard Lua IDE (Plua2.prc), the help facility (Plua2Help.prc) and the runtime (Plua2RT.prc). Your compiled app need only be distributed with the runtime, though you must also include a copy of MathLib.prc and any C-libraries you built. A pre-built MathLib.prc is available from Plua Revisited.
Although the source code for the plua2c "cross-compiler" is necessarily part of this source archive, for a 64-bit fixed version compatible with most modern operating systems, see the separate plua2c source code. (Among other things, it's a lot easier to build!)
Plua 2's build system requires the following:
prc-tools2.3pilrc3.2multilink0.3
These are admittedly difficult build requirements, as prc-tools is not 64-bit friendly and does not compile on many modern operating systems. x86 users may be able to use prc-tools-remix. The source code for multilink is available from its home page but you may need to build the dependent specialized libbfd it requires separately. Source code for a 64-bit fixed version of pilrc is available from Plua Revisited.
By default, the build system expects the PalmOne SDK to be present at /opt/palmdev/PalmOne (such that /opt/palmdev/PalmOne/Incs exists) and the 68K COFF library fragments used by multilink in /usr/local/lib/m68k-palmos-multilink. In addition, the prc-tools binaries should be in your path. If this is not the case on your system, change ./config.palmos. You can get a copy of the PalmOne SDK (and others) from this Github archive.
If you have a Power Mac running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4, you can use these instructions and binary packages, which include pre-built versions of all the tools mentioned above as well as the PalmOne SDK.
With the system thus configured, type make to build the Palm OS binaries, which will be deposited in bin/palmos. These are PRCs which can be installed directly into POSE or your real Palm hardware. make clean will clear any intermediate artifacts and the final objects.
Currently Plua is built on a Power Mac G5 Quad (and sometimes an iMac G4) running a Mac OS X Tiger (10.4) build of prc-tools and multilink, and an updated copy of pilrc. These systems run the compiler and linker in 32-bit mode, avoiding issues with 64-bit systems.
Support the AlphaSmart dana's wide screen.
Support for built-in WiFi with Sony Clié devices (currently this doesn't seem to report when a network transmission has completed).
Allow chaining of apps (either native applications or Plua scripts) using something like SysUIAppSwitch().
Please don't open issues for feature requests unless you intend to work on them. There is plenty of work to do.