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I need to program a device which takes instructions using compiled Turbo Pascal 7 scripts, but the documentation on the custom units included with the device are not sufficient to allow me to understand what's going on when I write the programs, which is starting to cause some problems.

There are a number of .TPU files included as libraries, which I gather are pre-compiled binary library files like dlls. I think even having the names, types and function prototypes from these libraries would go a LONG way towards helping me figure this out, but I can't find any documentation on the format of a TPU file. I can definitely see some function names and variables that I recognize in there, but I don't have any way to interpret all the binary junk around them.

Is there any sort of utility out there that I'm not finding to allow exploring the function and variable prototypes? If not, is there some format specification document floating around that I can look in to do it manually?

Update: I still haven't figured it out, but I am now fairly certain that these were written by the aliens in Mars Attacks:

Actual line from one of the TPU files.

Paul
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2 Answers2

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TPU files can be compared to lib files in C (not dlls).

So you have compiled code. It's been a long time ago since i programmed in pascal, so i don't know any tool that can make Pascal code out of compiled libray code.

The only thing i know is this. It explains the TPU file format.
But it's for Turbo Pascal 5.5 (dated August 11, 1990 - right from the stone age of programming), so there may be differences to Turbo Pascal 7.0.

joe
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  • Yeah, I don't need pascal code, just the function prototypes. – Paul Jul 18 '13 at 19:16
  • OK, looking through this, some of what I'd already been able to reverse-engineer is present here, so I don't think the file format is drastically different. Thanks for finding this documentation. – Paul Jul 18 '13 at 19:53
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The file you want is intrfc70.zip, still widely available on the WWW. I see that versions for 4,5,5.5,and 6 are also still available. Written by Duncan Murdoch, one of the legendary names of Turbo Pascal, and still the top listing that comes up in Google for that name.

You'll find intrfc70 on his non-job-related shareware/freeware page here: http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/programs/index.htm

david
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