[colorforth] NASM for colorforth

[Alex Thiel <alex.lists@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 07 July 2002 19:24, Mark Slicker wrote:
>
> What is needed is to get more people into the process of
> contributing. The hardware required is probably holding many back. What is
> a good strategy for addressing this? There is pretty much only two things
> that seem to go wrong, floppy and graphics. What is needed is proper
> diagnoses. What kind of system the person has, what graphics card. Which
> one fails. Chuck has a database for some of this. What could also be
> useful is if colorForth does work, what version are you using? What
> versions did you try that didn't work? Some of the versions I created with
> vbe code did help some people. There have also been mesages posted to
> this list which contain fixes for other graphics cards.

I am currently working on a floppy driver in colorForth. I've had quite a hard 
time to figure out how this is supposed to work, but I hope I will have some 
code ready by the end of the week. (My PhD is already way behind schedule, ah 
well...)

The first version should work on most machines that work with the floppy 
driver in the kernel. I will then try to extend it for older controllers that 
do not support implied seek operations and to use DMA mode. Doing this 
outside of the kernel gives you room for some error handling, too.

I will post what I have done on the colorForth wiki pages in the interest of 
keeping things together.
As for sharing code: under Linux I found it quite convenient to use 'dd' to 
copy blocks from the floppy to my hard disk and vice versa. Isn't there a 
program like that for DOS?

Finally, let me vote for NASM as an assembler. That would make it easier for 
people that are used to MASM, and we should definitly use an assembler that 
is free software and runs under DOS and Linux.

Cheers,

	Alex

P.S.: I find it quite hard to code in colorForth. It's so different - I start 
to think I have to look at things differently. Maybe that's what's keeping 
people from contributing. Hm, I'll get back to the list with more specific 
questions later.

	A.------------------------

To Unsubscribe from this list, send mail to Mdaemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with:
unsubscribe ColorForth
as the first and only line within the message body
Problems   -   List-Admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Main ColorForth site   -   http://www.colorforth.com