looking for original fig-forht

[ptorric]

hi all, can anyone help me to find out the original figforth implementation?
i'm not search a port on 6502 but the original one.
tnx!

[Wally Daniels]

ptorric wrote:

hi all, can anyone help me to find out the original figforth implementation?
i'm not search a port on 6502 but the original one.
tnx!

Hello ptorric,

Well, the 6502 implementation was one of if not 'the' original
implementation. If in fact you are looking for the original fig 6502
port, I can help you. I transcribed it to a file a long time ago, but still
have it tucked away. Please email me privately if you want a copy.

Best Wishes, Wally

[cyz]

Hello people,
I think tho first fig forth was for the 8080.
But I like the 6502 CPU better.
Hey does Wally have that transcription of the 6502 fig forth yet?
Reminds me of one time I typed in the 8k or 4k monitor listing from a somewhat poor
pdf for a MAC8 Western Electric Processor Trainer unit.
That was a weird thing.
I had bought a few of them on ebay that had been modified for a special purpose
and the ROMs changed too.
They had some 8255s and LED display with a hex keypad.
I had to find all the typos and figure out the blurry print in the pdf to get it to work.

But I am wondering if anyone has the manual for the Panasinic and other three brands of "HHC Snap SDT" which was a programming tool kit with an emulator that ran on an Apple II
It was based somewhat on Forth as the OS for the little hand held computers.

There was also A SnapForth and SnapBasic that ran in a 16 k 24 pin ROM.
They were compilers unlike the MSbasic that ran in 8k of ROM.
I think the SDT ran off of a floppy disk.
The other two SnapBasic and SnapForth had two manuals each Tutorial and Reference.
I believe the Snap OS was written by Henry Laxen of Forth fig or 79 83 era.
There are supposed to be some of the SnapForth commands built into the OS but there
is not much documentation around for that.
There is getting to be less and less support/information left for them.
I guess I should have mentioned they have a NMOS 6502 in them.
There is a strange power saving scheme where the CPU and ROM power is switched off
and on by the display chip but the RAM remains powered to keep the program info.
I think there are routines to keep the CPU from getting lost but I haven't figured them out
yet.
I better stop for now this may be a little too much for this topic.
Thank you
CY

[GARTHWILSON]

cyz wrote:

Hey does Wally have that transcription of the 6502 fig forth yet?

He did that in the 1990's, and then he got my 65816 Forth going on a 65265 and used that in his work for a long time (might still be, but I have not had contact with him in quite awhile) but I think it was Douglas Beattie who contributed the 6502 fig-Forth transcription at http://6502.org/source/, in the middle of the section called "Monitors, Assemblers, and Interpreters" which is way down the page. Wally is a great guy but his work and interests seem to have changed and unfortunately we don't hear from him anymore. I hope he gets an email that you replied after his post above.

One thing I have on my list of things to put on my website is to clean up and publish my 65c02 Forth and '816 Forth, which will take a ton of work, especially the '02 Forth. They have a ton of powerful features that weren't on public-domain Forths. I've had this pipe dream of porting it to an available board like one of Daryl's so the beginner has something that works right out of the box.

Quote:

It was based somewhat on Forth as the OS for the little hand held computers.

I originally started with Forth on the HP-71 which was a very powerful hand-held computer for its day, although the Forth module was poorly done. Being Forth though, it of course let you "get under the hood" and improve it a lot, even though its kernel was in ROM.

Quote:

I better stop for now this may be a little too much for this topic.

Not at all. We have posts here that are legitimately many, many times the length of yours.

[cjb]

ptorric wrote:

hi all, can anyone help me to find out the original figforth implementation?
i'm not search a port on 6502 but the original one.
tnx!

The 6502 was the original host of FIG-FORTH.
However, the 6502 assembler version wasn't the original original-- it was as FORTHers call, 'metacompiled'-- it used another FORTH system to bootstrap it, and the source-code for that has recently been rediscovered and placed online.

http://www.forth.org/fig-forth/fig-forth-model.pdf

(Discussion about it recorded at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... D2uBvGPBiw )

[BigDumbDinosaur]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

One thing I have on my list of things to put on my website is to clean up and publish my 65c02 Forth and '816 Forth, which will take a ton of work, especially the '02 Forth. They have a ton of powerful features that weren't on public-domain Forths. I've had this pipe dream of porting it to an available board like one of Daryl's so the beginner has something that works right out of the box.

My POC unit might be a good candidate for the '816 version. Do you ROMify your Forth kernel...or how is loaded?

Quote:

Quote:

I better stop for now this may be a little too much for this topic.

Not at all. We have posts here that are legitimately many, many times the length of yours.

::: cough ::: cough :::

[GARTHWILSON]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

My POC unit might be a good candidate for the '816 version. Do you ROMify your Forth kernel...or how is loaded?

I made it a ROM version, but I know i should make the modifications for a RAM version too. The code all runs in bank 0, partly since I developed it on the 65802, but when I do a real '816 computer I'll add the long-addressing words so data is not limited to bank 0 and I'll be able to have arrays that are megabytes long. NEXT (which is just a few instructions) runs in direct page (actually zero page since I didn't have any reason to move it) to avoid a double indirect; so if you want the code to run in other banks, you will probably need to modify it. Another idea when I have the other banks in hardware is to put the headers in another bank to free up more code space (although a mostly full bank of Forth is a huge amount of code, probably way beyond what anyone here would do).

[whartung]

The Forth for my simulator is basically the original, stock, fig-forth source code that I found online. It has minor tweaks (the U/ fix, maybe some others I can't think of at the moment, there are long threads here about the effort).

I really had to make the most minimal changes to it to get it to work. Since I wrote the assembler to match their source code, I didn't have to change much of anything.

The source is clear enough and my simple I/O bits are trivial enough to overwrite if you want to port it. Disk I/O works on it (using my disk routines, which are buried in the simulator, but still, simple).

[ptorric]

cjb wrote:

However, the 6502 assembler version wasn't the original original-- it was as FORTHers call, 'metacompiled'-- it used another FORTH system to bootstrap it, and the source-code for that has recently been rediscovered and placed online.

well, it takes a bit of time but we got it!
thank you.

[cyz]

Hi again people,
Boy everybody is taking snippits from my post and spreading them around.
Yea I guess thats ok though.
Well I used to have more of those old 6502 computers various brands and basicly more old computers in general.
I don't have near as many any more but I still have a few left.
I got interested in these little HHC computers as I began to learn more about them.
They are not perfect by any means but they do posess some interesting features.
The bad part there is so linited of an amount of information or software and the hardware is complicated to interface to.
just to add bankable ram you need several ICs for buffering ,address decode, bank switching, and module hardware type identification.
Also the system can only have 8k ram internaly, but the four k models can be upgraded
to 8 k with just 2 6116s.
the other bad thing is that the option rom soickets are only for 24 pin roms eliminating
the ease of using a 27128 to fill up the 16 k slot without using adaptors cables or complicated circuitry. That is why I was thinking if someone could make a programmable
chip to replace the complicated banking circuitry you could bank in a large ram and or rom inside the case possibly replacing the os or piggy back.
But also The SDT manual and or software would come in handy if it could be located.
Well I bet I should have started a new topic this time.
Thanks again,
Cy