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[colorforth] Umbilical colorForth

Hi,

I have found a 350MHz Compaq PC  that does not work with the colorForth
keyboard, driver which looks at I/O port 0x64.
Compaq seem to have a different type of incompatibility with every machine!
The 350MHz PC has a display that only works with Chuck's video driver - a
450MHz Compaq only partially worked with Chuck's code - the image was there
but masked by horizontal lines ( could it be the VESA linear array bit ? ).
At least the floppies read OK...
Debugging this could be tricky - one idea I have is to use another PC
running colorForth as a "terminal", and connect through the serial port.
This would also make a good testbed for network block access.

In the early '80s I was using a simple protocol that used ASCII control
characters to initiate block read/write, and a QUIT loop.
As we have loads of memory, I would simple allocate 256 K for the remote
machine, with a table of updated flags.
We will also need to read/write I/O address space. I don't see the need for
QUIT as the host PC's stack will be fine for entering text.
But we will need to select local/remote execution. chipForth uses
vocabularies for this ( HOST and REMOTE ) . Could we use the macro
vocabulary for this? Or a different colour token? Any ideas???
I will probably go for a PPP style HDLC subset for packet transfer.

[ BTW for ANS speakers : vocabulary = wordlist ]

Regards

Howerd

PS I like Mark's Matrox driver. I will try to find one to try it out on...




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