[Coco] f83 for the 6809 -- It'a Alive!

[Brett Heath]

On 10/17/08, John W. Linville <linville at tuxdriver.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 01:28:31AM -0700, Brett Heath wrote:
>
>> A few weeks ago I noticed that I once again had the necessary tools
>> (and the time!) to
>> resurrect the project. After som debugging  the f83 kernel is running
>> on Jeff Vavasour's CoCo 2 emulator under dosemu at one of my linux
>> consoles.
>
> Wow, that sounds really cool!  Any idea when you will have something
> to share with us?

I'm willing to share everything now, as long as it's understood to be
pre-Alpha ;-)

Seriously, unless you're allready famiiiar with f83 (note
capitalization) or at least
with forth in general it's not going be very useful unless you want to
play with the
hacked up metacompiler/cross-assembler under MS-DOS or CP/M.

f83 was originally released with _complete_ source (One of the neatest things
about it was that you could modify the source and use it to build a new version
of itself, very Zen;-) and a license that in effect said, "do what you
want with it
but give us credit for our work"., I intend to continue the tradition.
If you want to get
familiar with f83 it's available on taygeta (the forth intererest
group archive) for
MS-DOS, CP/M, and CP/M-68k (and maybe one or two other platforms) and until I
get the disk I/O going you would need one of these to play around with my tools
and/or source files.

One thing to note. f83 is a particular implementation of the F83 (or Forth-83)
standard. Although it's old enough that nobody much cares anymore about that
particular distinction (F83 was superceded by ANSII-Standard Forth in the '90s)
it's useful to keep it in mind if you're going to poke around in the
Forth archives.

Anyway, if somewone is really interested in playing around with my toolkit just
tell me where to send/upload it:
  The kernel09 source is about 200k
  The cross assembler source (copied from Brad Rodriquez' CHROMIUM) is
     about 26k
  The modified metacompiler source is about 50k
  The source for the DSKIMAGE utility, which lets the compiler build on disk
    rather in memory, is about 26k (most of which isn't used, Idea shamelessly
    stolen from Brad).
  As I said the .pak file binary is just under 12k. It assumes 4k just
below 7F00
     for disk buffers that it doesn't use and another page or so just
below that for
     stack space and input buffers. The only I/O implemented so far is
char-in from
     the keyboard and char-out to the VDG using the the Basic ROM
calls. So far it's
     run happily anywhere in low memory I care to load it.

There are also som ad-hoc tools for MS-DOS f83 which use about 10k of source
(mainly a clock interface for the editor DateStamp function, a limited
ability to
navigate directories, and a 16 line command history). All of the source is in
f83 .blk files.

Brett K. Heath