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[colorforth] Success...my first boot screen


Mark Slicker wrote:

> 
> There exists a flat 32-bit real mode, I just found out about this. See:
> 
> http://www.nondot.org/sabre/os/files/ProtectedMode/FLAT.txt
> 
> With this you can make bios calls, and run 32-bit code.
> 
> I might try to make a colorForth version in flat real mode with bios calls
> for floppy and video. There should be no difference in functionality,
> except hopefully this will work on many more machines.
> 

This looks promising. It's too bad that not even the Intel documentation
fully advertises all the tricks you can do with 386+ processors,
although it does hint at such things.

Hopefully the BIOS will not mess up the situation somehow. It would be a
fantastic breakthrough to achieve hardware independence for ColorForth.

I suspect that things are not quite so simple and that unattractive
compromises will be necessary, but it seems worth experimenting along
these lines.

Myron Plichota------------------------

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