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Re: [colorforth] ?dup


I'm making progress on colorForth 4.4 (year.month). Completion will be
delayed if chip financing comes thru.

It will boot from USB flash. Whether this will work on more computers than
the floppy boot, remains to be seen. Kernel is minimal, with keyboard, video
and editor as source. Default video will be 1024x768 with 24-bit color.

Boot is coded in colorForth, with enhanced assembler to accomodate more
Pentium instructions. It was a challenge to fit into 512 bytes. The theorem
"A byte can be saved from any program of more than 512 bytes" was applied
repeatedly.

I preserve the boot, FAT and directory structure of the flash. Distribution
will require downloading a file, copying it to flash and writing the first
(boot) sector to sector 0.

The 18-block cylinder intrinsic to floppies will go away. However it's
replaced by the 16-block write characteristic of flash. FILLER.TXT will
still be necessary to align COLOR.COM on a 16-block boundary.


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