[colorforth] colorforth in the bochs

[Alex Thiel <alex.lists@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

for those of you who are interested in writing hardware drivers for 
colorForth: I have got it to run in the bochs, an open source x86 emulator.

* You need the current CVS version of bochs. See the homepage at 
bochs.sourceforge.net. Before you compile, you have to apply 
patch.floppy-athiel from the patches directory in the source tree. This 
implements non-DMA I/O for the simulated floppy disc controller.

* Since the bochs video BIOS supports only 8 bit graphics, I have made an 8bit 
version of colorForth starting from Mark Slicker's GNU assembler version. The 
tarball is available from his site at
www.oakland.edu/~maslicke/colorforth/vesa-chuck-8bit.tgz

Note that this version of colorForth does not support the entire wordset of 
the original version. I did not bother to patch drawing words, e.g. box etc., 
since I want to use it mainly for understanding hardware interaction better. 

There is a little typo in the Makefile:
if you use the 8bit version you have to include logo8.blk in the disc image, 
not logoRGB.blk.
To get the original RGB version of colorForth, you will have to change the 
include directive in color.s and update the Makefile to use logoRGB.blk.

* Concerning the bochs setup: Make sure that the amount of memory you simulate 
is at least 32 MB, or change the line 

     frame:  .int 0x2000000 - hp * vp * 2# 32 M

in 8bit.s accordingly.

That's all I can think of at the moment. If someone wants to try this and has 
problems with the setup, feel free to mail anytime.

Cheers,

	Alex



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