Friday, January 20, 2017

Building a 68000 Single Board Computer - Another Forth



I found another Forth implementation for the 68000 here. This one was distributed by Albert van der Horst from a Forth group in Holland. Unlike eForth that I described in my last blog post, this one
is compatible with the fig-FORTH standard.

It comes with default I/O routines to use a 6850 UART address $10040 (presumably the Motorola ECB), the same as my TS2.

I was able to build it with the VASM assembler with one trivial change. Loading it onto the TS2 over the serial port, it came up and seems to work fine.

Here is a sample session:

TUTOR  1.3 > GO 3648
PHYSICAL ADDRESS=00003648

68000 fig-FORTH V1.0 
1 2 3 4    OK
. 4    OK
+    OK
. 5    OK
* . 1    OK
." HELLO, WORLD! " HELLO, WORLD!    OK

( LARGE LETTER-F)    OK
: STAR 42 EMIT ;    OK
: STARS 0 DO STAR LOOP ;    OK
: MARGIN CR 30 SPACES ;    OK
: BLIP MARGIN STAR ;    OK
: BAR MARGIN 5 STARS ;    OK
: F BAR BLIP BAR BLIP BLIP CR ;    OK


                              *****
                              *
                              *****
                              *
                              *
   OK

I think it's time to dig out my old copy of Starting Forth by Leo Brodie and refresh my knowledge of this programming language.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

@Jeff, what font are you using for the monitor?