readme.htm colorForth cf2010 V4.1 Howerd Oakford 2010 Jun 08

Ported to NASM format - please see http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasm/

Based on code by :

Chuck Moore (inventor, MASM)

Mark Slicker (ported to GNU Assembler)

Peter Appelman (ported to NASM with qwerty mods)

and others... Thanks!!!

Feedback welcome to howerd@inventio.co.uk

Quick start guide

=================

Put a blank, formatted floppy disk in the floppy drive and double click on "go.bat"

This will create a bootable colorForth floppy disk

Reboot your computer with the floppy in the drive

You may need to adjust your BIOS settings to get the floppy to boot -

please see http://www.inventio.co.uk/getbios.htm from http://www.inventio.co.uk/cfdos.htm for how to do this...

Note : this version requires a built-in floppy drive - it will not work from an external USB drive.

Details

=======

The 256K binary image cf2010.blk is created from COLOR.COM ( 12K ) concatenated

with ICONS.FNT ( 6K ) and CFDOS4CF.BLK ( 238K ).

COLOR colorForth system

ICONS.FNT character icons ( blocks 12 to 17 from CFDOS4BLK )

CFDOS4CF.BLK colorForth source ( blocks 18 to 255 from CFDOS4BLK )

Note that just as in the CFDOS4.BLK release, the last 4 blocks are not saved/restored

by the colorForth system - so don't use them! ( 14 sectors x 18K = 252K ).

The file COLOR is assembled from color.asm , boot.asm and gen.asm by DOS batch file go.bat.

NASM is included here for this purpose.

color.asm colorForth system

boot.asm floppy disk boot

gen.asm generic video display using a VESA call

The files are from Chuck Moore's 2001 Jul 22 release, which include modifications to

the floppy disk code by Terry Loveall and Kris Johnstone.

Thanks also to Mark Slicker (who ported colorForth to the GNU Assembler)

and Peter Appelman (who ported it to NASM with qwerty modifications),

Jeff Fox for many online explanations, and many others who provided colorForth programs.

I ( Howerd ) have made some small changes to merge with my CFDOS4.BLK release.

1. changed the version number in the boot sector

2. changed the assembler output length to 12K

3. changed the go.bat file to merge color.com, icons.fnt and cfdos4cf.blk

4. added floppy.com to download automatically to the floppy disk

5. ported to NASM, merging the Mark Slicker GAS version with the Peter Appelman

NASM version to give a binary file that is "nearly identical" to the original

CFDOS4.blk file. The differences are certain opcodes assembled by NASM that are

different to GAS, and some state variables that were saved in the original

binary file.

"Modified from the original written by Chuck Moore. Thanks Chuck, nice job!"

I second that!

Enjoy!!!

Howerd 8^)

howerd@inventio.co.uk www.inventio.co.uk

From the original readme.txt file :

Readme for colorForth on an Asus P2B-D motherboard.

Modified from the orginal written by Chuck Moore. Thanks Chuck, nice job!

07/19/01 Terry Loveall loveall@qwest.net

07/22/01 Kris Johnson kristopher_d_johnson@yahoo.com

THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH NO WARRANTY. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

The floppy modifications were derived from examination of the BIOS

int 13 code. They are empirically determined and work on my (TL's)

system. Your Mileage May Vary.

TL's system is an Asus P2B-D dual PII 450 Mhz motherboard. It uses the

440BX chipset, a Winbond W83977tf super I/O chip and PII4XE PCIset

(Southbridge, I think).

The modified source for the floppy is located mainly in boot.asm. It

consists of adding a write strobe to IO address 0E1h to all I/O to

the floppy controller at IO address range 03F0h. This additional

code expanded the boot sector to a size larger than 512 bytes, which

necessitated a re-structuring of the boot sector code. The

'call stop, call dma' code was moved from boot.asm to the 'start1'

label in color.asm

For color forth operation and programming see :

Chuck Moore http://colorforth.com/.

John M Drake http://primarycolorforth.blogspot.com/

Ray St. Marie http://colorforth.net/

Green Arrays, Inc. http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/cf-elements.htm (may be slightly different)

Wiki http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ColorForth (interesting, but I don't agree with everything there ;)

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth

And of course there is always Google...