Re: [colorforth] ?dup

["Howerd Oakford" <howerd.oakford@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Chuck,

> I'm making progress on colorForth 4.4 (year.month). Completion will be
> delayed if chip financing comes thru.
I hope that chip financing comes through synchronised to completion of CF4.4
;)

> It will boot from USB flash. Whether this will work on more computers than
> the floppy boot, remains to be seen. Kernel is minimal, with keyboard,
video
> and editor as source. Default video will be 1024x768 with 24-bit color.
The 1024x768 standard video is very important. This is first time a language
has defined a video format.
24 bit will of course, make it incompatible with CF1.0...And run at half the
speed....( sounds like ?dup again ? )

How far have you got with the editor as source? I have the display side only
done - based on what I believe was your code.

> Boot is coded in colorForth, with enhanced assembler to accomodate more
> Pentium instructions. It was a challenge to fit into 512 bytes. The
theorem
> "A byte can be saved from any program of more than 512 bytes" was applied
> repeatedly.
Less is clearly more!

> I preserve the boot, FAT and directory structure of the flash.
Distribution
> will require downloading a file, copying it to flash and writing the first
> (boot) sector to sector 0.
This could be a job for Windows. I have code to write raw sectors to any
disk ( in theory ).
I can see cfwin.exe replacing cfdos.com...

> The 18-block cylinder intrinsic to floppies will go away. However it's
> replaced by the 16-block write characteristic of flash. FILLER.TXT will
> still be necessary to align COLOR.COM on a 16-block boundary.
At least its an integer power of 2 !

Regards

Howerd


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