Charles Davis wrote:
enews1.newsguy.com>> Josh Grams wrote:
>> Charles Davis wrote:
enews1.newsguy.com>>>>Thumb Drives do have their uses. Haven't yet arranged one to boot from,
>>>but I can see that day, "Over the horizon". (I'm running Apple PPC Mac's)
>>
>> Since (I think) you're talking about writing a stand-alone Forth system...
>>
>> I played with writing a minimal Forth that booted on a PPC Mac, so I
>> have notes and code for interfacing with OpenFirmware from the OS side
>> (i.e. as a sort of BIOS). It's not at all difficult, but it did take me
>> a while to find all the appropriate pieces of documentation. So if
>> that's ever useful to you...
>>
> Thank you very much for the offer. Particularly because it 'fits' with
> what I think I'm going to have to do.
>
> The PPC from Apple, is about the only current 'easily available' RISC
> CPU system available, that I'm aware of.
Yeah...there have been some neat little single-board PPC systems, but
they've all been pretty short-lived, though I think Genesi might still
sell one. I did a quick web search, and it looks like there might be
some small MIPS systems. And ARM is sorta RISC-like (I think), and of
course there are plenty of those around.
> Anyway, with these processors (RISC) in the pipeline, I'd LIKE to be
> able to come up with an OS (in Forth).
Here's what I have -- a few notes, and a minimal Forth system (written
for the GNU assembler) that builds for Linux and as an OS under Open
Firmware. It doesn't have any drivers, just uses OF for I/O. Also it's
from back when I was into Chuck Moore's stuff, so it uses dual
dictionaries and is generally non-standard. This is just stuff I was
playing around with; it wasn't intended to be released, but it may be
some help.
http://qualdan.com/forth/ofw-notes.txt
http://qualdan.com/forth/fpos-2004-06-03.tar.bz2
--Josh
