[ColorForth] Forth on the Mac? (was: Re: USB and other serial ...)

[roelf <postbus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 07-12-2001 09:19, Arthur W. Green at goshawk@xxxxxxx wrote:

> Mr. Johnson wrote:
>> 
>> It's unfortunate, too.  All the new Macs will boot from Firewire no
>> problem (Forth to the rescue!).
>> 
> Actually, Macs already have a form of Forth in them, in the form of "Open
> Firmware". Suns, in particular, also use this.
> 
> But, as you already know, the real opposition to putting something like a
> version of colorForth on the Mac is the lack of any real documentation
> describing its hardware and internal software (that being largely Open
> Firmware).
> 
> Apple has a number of tech notes on Open Firmware, but they [naturally] leave
> out all the important stuff we need.
> 

Indeed, this is absolutly true. Hear, hear!
I have tried many things since I discovered OF on the first iMac.
I'm completely defeated!
My goal: a little standalone Forth, direct on the metal. No OS, never
needed it for my work. Just access to the sound system, USB and later
Firewire (realtime fullscreen video procesing). And this for all the
obvious and familiar reasons, expressed by many Forth users over
many years; much better than I could.

> My only thoughts that if anyone was actually interested in this if
> we...erk...dissect a portion of an existing source tree for PPC Linux or some
> derivative (e.g. Yellow Dog).

One option I tried, was to 'study' the PPC Linux stuff under the motto:
If those Linux people can, I can (this attitude normally works ;0)
But being a nearly complete C illiterate and unfamiliar with Linux, I had
no idea where they were heading for, so didn't know what was important.
Normally I can extract some meaning from small C sources, but this was
too much, way too much.

So, if any of you more knowledgeable could, I would be enormous gratefull,
more than that...
A place to look is Darwin of course, the underlying Unix system for OS X.
It's Open Source as well.
BTW Many Apple (firmware) updates are Forth files, perhaps one could find
something there.

One thing I did with/for OF was a little test, how something like colorForth
would look like and feel, very simple and only touching the outside.
http://www.bmbcon2.demon.nl/toolshed/cftish/color.zip 10k
or
http://www.bmbcon2.demon.nl/toolshed/cftish/color.sit 10k
Instructions how to load from within OF included, also original posting
to clfmac summer 2001 for running it on other Forths.

many regards
-Roelf
http://this.is/bmbcon

------------------------

To Unsubscribe from this list, send mail to Mdaemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with:
unsubscribe ColorForth
as the first and only line within the message body
Problems   -   List-Admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Main ColorForth site   -   http://www.colorforth.com