[colorforth] Ray catching up...

["Ray St. Marie" <ray.stmarie@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Ray here.
NOTE: this message is broken up into atleast two pieces as
chaossolutions has a word limit per post.


Hi, Ray here.
NOTE: I'm replying to the entire message as this seems to be the only
way that I've received most ( all actually)  of what's here.



On 9/4/07, John Comeau <jc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Well, Howerd, I guess it worked this time :^)
>
> I never tried booting the ISO via USB. It's made to boot from a CDROM.
>

Nick is right as far as I recall. Chuck has the USB driver on the '05
version of colorforth that was distributed by Jeff Fox. If not already
known to you, that version shipped with unexpected corruption, which
in turn was corrected by Josh Grahms at :

http://qualdan.com/colorforth/chuck05-jg5.tar.gz

> I wish I could get myself to get back into the colorForth project, and
> get something that would work for your system, but I'm embroiled in a
> lot of other projects and right now am really hyped on a new
> human-powered vehicle I'm designing, plus other stuff from ideas I
> just got at the Burning Man festival.
>

Burning Man sounds interesting. So does a human-powered vehicle.
As for colorforth :

I've got the bug again. :-) Been reading it ( the windows version
mostly but concentrating on the colorforth) in hex code using a MASM
listing, cross-ref-ing the machine code with the Intel bibles and
teaching myself basic assembler in MASM, NASM, and FASM.

I seem to have a psychotic if unhealthy need to disassemble this in as
finely grained detail that I can muster.

ChuckBot the Cursor has reached another level of factoring. I keep
thinking I've got it down as tightly as I can go without losing the
readability that a beginner could understand with as little as
possible information comming from outside of the program itself.  I'm
with you Nick, and the Chuck of the old movies, I'm truly impressed
with this colorforth.

Quartus of Quartus Forth for the Palm fame sorta pushed me off the
colorforth pedestal for a bit. His realistic claim being that
colorforth on paper might could be construed :-)  as a ridiculous form
of the forth language, he never having used the system... I got over
that and intend to continue the study of colorforth and ChuckBot,
which I also intend to have run on them 100DollarLaptops ...

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/    or better  http://laptop.org/

...that will soon be the most ubiquitous machines in the third world
at the very least.
ChuckBot is colorforth's version of Richard Pattis' Karel the Robot,
used to quickly bring newbie Pascal programers up to speed.  It's even
more impressive in a system like colorforth native where you are
playing with a program that is the operating system ( well truly the
colorforth programmer is the operating system but I digress ) can
quickly become a turtleDraw program or a text editor or many types of
games or practical applications with simple extensions to the ChuckBot
main program. I've used ChuckBot to demonstrate binary addition and
also decimal multiplication and addition. He also moves your chess
pieces for you. Future ChuckBots are intended to demonstrate a visual
representation of Forth programs "running" in the machine.

colorforth native should be something achievable for the 100DollarLaptop
as the system includes the an openSource Forth bios or so i'm told.

> On 9/3/07, Nick Maroudas <alice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Howerd here:
> >
> > Hi Nick,

Ray here: Hi Howerd John and Nick

:-)

> >
> > I have been unable to post  to the
> > colorforth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx mail
> > list for a long time.
> >
> > I tried to contact the webmaster, but with no effect.
> >
> > I think it is to do with me changing my email client
> > and reply address
> > - I don't know what I registered as...
> >

(ray:) Hmm, I don't know. I don't seem to get very much mail from the
list and I often wonder if it's dead or not. I tried to start a
GoogleGroup for colorforth and somehow was never given the rights of
the creator of the group. So far the state of this situation has not
been rectifiable. Oh well.

> > Maybe other people have this problem too, or maybe
> > its because
> > Intellisys has drained all of the colorForth
> > resources ;)
> >
> >
> >
> > The John Comeau USB BIOS interface is tantalisingly
> > close to working.

(ray) That is good news. I've get into the sourceforge archive every
now and again. Way to go John! Keep it up when you can, if you can.

> > He produced two versions, one that boots via a DOS
> > boot system (that
> > runs), and one that boots directly by using the BIOS
> > to read from a USB
> > flash disk, emulating a floppy (that doesn't run on
> > my hardware). John
> > says that the only difference in the binary image is
> > to do with the
> > type of boot (a value in the boot sector). The system
> > is probably one
> > bit away from booting and running from USB, but I
> > can't fix it without
> > re-doing all of John's work - installing assembler,
> > BOCHS or whatever,
> > Linux/Cygwin etc etc. I don't have time right now to
> > do that, so its on
> > my back burner...

(ray) I don't have BOCHS yet but i do have the Cygwin set up now. I'm
not far away from looking into this...

> >
> > At least I know now that we can access 16 bit BIOS
> > calls from
> > the 32 bit CF environment, in "unreal" mode.
> >

(ray) WOW! no kidding? Must try this.This includes a call to what a
segment register to put the machine into mode?

> >
> >
> > I am reaching a point where I can do some more CF
> > work, so anything you
> > are doing is very interesting...
> >
> >
> >
> > Best wishes,
> >
> >
> >
> > Howerd  8^)
> >

(ray) that's good news as well Howerd. You've done some pretty neat
stuff so far and I always look forward to exploring your view of the
system.

> >
> > Quoting Nick Maroudas <alice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> >
> > > Nick here,
> > >
> > > The CF blog seems to have gone dead, but if anyone
> > > out
> > > there is still listening:
> > >

(ray) Ya! I'm still listening. :-) Sorry for being so anti-social.

> > > 1. Ray, sorry to hear about your diabetes and
> > > resultant
> > > financial problems.  As a small token, I could send
> > > $100 if you could produce code that saves CF on
> > > flash
> > > memory card instead of floppy.  USB code for flash
> > > is
> > > in Chuck's latest version, but not commented.  John
> > > Comeau has booted CF from CD by omitting floppy
> > > emulation and just saving the basic CF image. I feel
> > > sure that a flash boot would be even simpler, if one
> > > knew one's way around.

(ray) OOH money always sounds good! :-) and I thank you for the offer
but it's not necessary. I'm trying my best to find situations I can
fully employ the talents that don't require my brawn so much.  Nan's
(wife) company shipped us to Denver late last month and we are just
settling in. I only have dial-up currently so i'm not online all the
time like I once was. This is good for my colorforth study as i'm not
nearly so distracted.
About John's work with booting... How impressive is that? KEWL beens
actually. I'm a junkie for reading colorforth and translating it all
the way back to ones and zeros and knowing what everything does. I'll
make the effort to read that code. Maybe as I go I could post my best
efforts in chunks for y'all to critique? WDYT about that?


more to follow on next mail ( silly word limit)
-- 
Raymond St. Marie ii,

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