[Coco] getting a .CCC file into an EPROM

spereira1952 at comcast.net spereira1952 at comcast.net
Thu Nov 20 07:39:46 EST 2014


Hello all, 

I've been on this list for several months now, and I greatly appreciate all the experience and expertise that is shared here. 

Over the past year, I rekindled my interest in the CoCo, acquiring a CoCo 3, making up an HDB-DOS cartridge, and I am successfully now working with DW4. I just received my SDC card and case from the good folks here, so another adventure awaits me. 

Another passion of mine is to get the Forth language running on every vintage computer I own. A while back, Robert Gault graciously assisted me and transformed the ColorForth.ccc file located in the Color Computer Archive into a .wav file, along with another .wav file to perform some memory adjustments, so I could reach my goal of being able to get Forth running on my CoCo 3. 

Since then, I have been hoping that a ColorForth cartridge might show up on eBay, or that someone, somewhere might offer one up for sale. So far, no joy on that. 

Lurking in the back of my mind is the idea that I could get the code from the .ccc file burned into an EPROM, and I could build my own ColorForth cartridge, like I did with HDB-DOS. Is this simply a case of reading the .ccc file with a HEX file editor and exporting the code into a form that an EPROM burner will accept, like an Intel HEX file? Once that code gets burned into an appropriate EPROM (ColorForth looks like it's 10K bytes, so it would have to be a 27128, I guess) I believe that all I would have to do is put it into a cartridge, like I did with HDB-DOS, and it would be good to go. Right? 

Please let me know if I am missing anything, or if my belief here is correct. 

Beyond that, if there are any other Forth addicts out there, please speak up. Is there another documented instance of Forth that I should be considering? The reason I settled on ColorForth is that the .ccc file is available, and the manual for it is also available. If others are also available, I'd like to try out those, as well. 

Thanks very much, in advance, 

smp 
- - - 
Stephen Pereira 
Bedford, NH 03110 
KB1SXE 




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