Mid Georgia
Software Associates, LLC

Support Our Troops

The Combat Shadow flies clandestine or low visibility, single or multi-ship low-level missions intruding politically sensitive or hostile territory to provide air refueling for special operations helicopters. The MC-130P primarily flies missions at night to reduce probability of visual acquisition and intercept by airborne threats.

Secondary mission capabilities may include airdrop of leaflets, small special operations teams, bundles and combat rubber raiding craft, as well as night vision goggles, takeoff and landing procedures and in-flight refueling as a receiver.

The MC-130P Combat Shadow utilizes two distinct Mil-Std-1750A processors for mission control and processing. The Interface Display Control Unit (IDCU) and the Bus Interface Control Unit (BICU) Line Replaceable Units (LRU) Operational Flight Programs (OFP) were originally developed and maintained using a VAX based JOVIAL toolset.

MGSA personnel performed the rehost of the JOVIAL OFPs from the VAX based tools to a standard PC host utilizing the Government approved JOVIAL toolset. The assembly modules for these OFPs were unique to the VAX based toolset previously used and MGSA rewrote these modules to align them with syntax requirements of the PC based assembler for the 1750A.

In order to perform this rehost and the required modifications to align the OFP source code to the PC based toolset and the JOVIAL 1589C standard, MGSA personnel examined over 1700 JOVIAL modules and successfully performed the necessary modifications.



A difficult aspect of this rehost was that of linking these new modules together to generate the final load image. MGSA personnel analyzed the requirements of these OFPs and successfully mapped the data into the Mil-Std-1750A processor. This required a thorough understanding of the memory and data requirements for the code, and a complete understanding of the 1750A architecture.

MGSA personnel provided support to establish the PC based configuration and build environment to create a complete package for the modifications and maintenance of this software.  MGSA personnel developed the MAKE utilities which track dependency requirements for these OFPs and perform the automated compilation and linking of this software.