OpenCOMAL project

OpenCOMAL is a nostalgia project for people who grew up with microcomputers, but it is also a fun way for kids (and everyone else) to learn about programming. You can learn structured programming, debugging, etc.

This project is a fork of OpenCOMAL from Darren Bane https://github.com/poldy/OpenCOMAL which was forked from Christian Pietsch https://github.com/pietsch/OpenCOMAL

Status

This is a modern C++20 reconstruction of OpenCOMAL, originally built for microcomputers. It features:

• Qt6 IDE with syntax highlighting, multi-tab editor, and integrated run/debug workflow
• Full COMAL execution with modern AST-based runtime, supporting numberless programs
• Z80 / CP/M-style assembly path for assembling and running .asm / .z80 / .s and raw .com programs
• Graphical output via 13 DRAW commands (lines, circles, rectangles, text, color, fill, etc.)
• Audio support (TONE + PLAY with ABC notation subset)
• Debug facilities including breakpoints, variable inspection, call-stack tracing, and SPAWN-based concurrency
• Assembly debug views including source-level stepping, line breakpoints, registers, flags, memory, and disassembly for paused Z80 programs
• LSP integration enabling real-time diagnostics and IDE features
• Language Server Protocol for VS Code, Kate, Vim, and other LSP-compatible editors

Known Limitations

• CURSOR command — Text positioning at screen coordinates not implemented (PRINT and graphics commands available as alternatives)
• Variable modification in debugger — Read-only inspection of variables during breakpoints (planned enhancement)
• Windows support — Currently Linux/Unix only; Windows port requires Qt I/O abstraction work
• Conditional breakpoints — Basic breakpoint support only; conditional variants planned
• CP/M compatibility — The Z80 runtime currently implements only a limited BDOS subset, so many real CP/M .COM binaries will not run yet
• Find/Replace — Editor has syntax highlighting and navigation but not Find/Replace (future enhancement)

Building

In order to build OpenCOMAL on Linux, do the following

Before building, you need to install the following

GCC 15, CMake 3.16+, cpack, Qt6, QScintilla for Qt6, libncurses-dev, libreadline-dev, qt6-base-dev, qt6-svg-dev, libqscintilla2-qt6-dev, qt6-qtmultimedia-dev, fluidsynth-dev

If you use Fedora, the packages are named -devel instead of -dev

# Clone this repo to your local workspace
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/oz1ktx/OpenCOMAL.git
# make a build directory
cd OpenCOMAL
mkdir build
# build the code
cd build
cmake ..
make -j
# if you want to install OpenCOMAL or distribute it, make a package
cd ..
cmake -S . -B build -DCPACK_GENERATOR="DEB;RPM"
cmake --build build --target package

If you already cloned the repository without submodules, populate the required third-party sources before configuring CMake:

git submodule update --init --recursive

The Z80 assembly and CP/M-compatible runtime work currently depends on these vendored upstream projects under third_party/:

• redcode/Z80
• redcode/Zeta
• z00m128/sjasmplus

OpenCOMAL builds them from source as git submodules and keeps them behind the project backend/adapter layer.