Offete_News
- To: misc
- Subject: Offete_News
- From: Wayne Morellini <waynem1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 12:47:53 +1000 (EST)
jfox@netcom.com (Jeff Fox) wrote:
>
>Dear MISC readers:
>
>Yesterday I got the following mail from Dr. C.H. Ting :
>
>>From TingCH@ccmail.apldbio.com Mon Oct 7 10:53:39 1996
>Subject: Forth Engines
>
>Dear Forth Engine User:
>
>More On Forth Engines, Volume 21 is now published.
[snip]
>He is pretty happy with the current
>design of I21, and the prototype chips worked fairly well, it displayed some
>very crispy pictures on a color monitor.
This is what we need 256+ colour pictures, I mean 384 pixels accross is
great in 16 colours, but if your going to make a micro-controller, you might
have well given it an LCD interface instead otherwise, higher resolutions
are better.
>
>I21 is being developed by iTv Corp. Its goal is to produce a low cost Internet
>ready computer for home use. I21 connects TV, phone, and a keyboard together
>to allow the user to surf Internet conveniently in a home entertainment
>environment. It attracted substantial investments and assembled a high power
>team of Forth programmers to produce the system.
Money is ready, I'm still waiting otherwise I'll have to buy the 160Mhz
Newton slate or the Webbook with the Sh-boom II chip.
Eugene I forgot to mention this one in reply to your post.
>
>At the beginning of this year, I visited Taiwan for a Forth Workshop. There I
>kind of committed myself to three projects: the first is to produce a system
>for the MuP21H chip in the 44-pin PLCC package, the second was to help
>marketing the CT100 microcontroller teaching/prototyping kit, and the third was
>to replace the BIOS chip on 486 motherboard to build very cheap but very
>powerful embedded processing systems. I wanted to report the results of these
>projects in this volume. This is the reason why this volume is delayed for so
>long.
>
>The new MuP21H kit uses a 82C51 UART chip to handle the serial communication
>with the host PC. There are many intriguing properties in 82C51 which ware not
>fully understood when I first laid out the PCB for it. Consequently the first
>board didn't work. After I ironed out all the bugs, the second layout worked
>perfectly. Now we can use this system to do serious programming, using a PC as
>the terminal server and file server. It is interesting to note that MuP21 is
>very close to an Internet computer, because of its video coprocessor and the
>very versatile I/O bus. Hooking an UART to it is only a simple demonstration
>of what it can do.
80 columns )
>
>As the DRAM price collapsed, as it should have years ago, the price of
>assembled MuP21 kit is also lowered from $350 to $250. Hope this price
>reduction will encourage you to try out this very exciting microprocessor. It
>is the only microprocessor which can generate video by itself.
>
>The CT100 Lab Board is an 8051 based microcontroller laboratory which contains
>about 20 different circuit groups for experiments on microcontroller
>programming and interfacing. You connect the circuit groups with jumper cables
>and are ready to write software to exercise the hardware. It is a great tool
>to teach microcontrollers. As the 8051 is driven by a F83 system, Forth is the
>natural language to develop software on this system. I was so impressed by
>this system that I promised to develop a teaching course for it. It took a
>while, but I finished building the course and also wrote a manual for it. I
>like to market it in the US. I think it is a great tool to train people in
>microcontroller programming and Forth, of course.
>
>I had more troubles than what I asked for in trying to replace BIOS with Forth.
>The vision was that 486 motherboards are become so cheap that they are now the
>cheapest and most powerful embedded system money can buy. For $100, you can
>get a 486 board with 1 MB of DRAM, 2 serial ports, 1 parallel port, a floppy
>controller, and a IDE hard disk controller, on an a single piece of PCB. My
>goal was to put an eForth in the BIOS socket and I could have a powerful
>computing element, which can be used as a node in a parallel computing system.
>486 microprocessor is interesting because of the 32-bit linear addressing space
>in the protected mode, and the powerful floating point math coprocessor. If I
>can link 10 or 100 of these beasts together, I could have a super computer on
>my desk.
>
>The progress was slow and tedious. I threw away the DOS extender I used in the
>386 eForth, V1.01, because the DOS extender itself is too complicated and not
>suitable for ROMming. I used Chuck's OK as the protected mode loader and get
>the eForth to work well in the 32-bit protected mode, entered from DOS.
>However, all attempts to replace BIOS ROM failed. The logic analyzer showed
>that the first subroutine call failed to return to the caller. Investigating
>code in BIOS made me feel hopeless because different motherboards use different
>chip sets which are initialized differently by different BIOS chips. It is
>apparently impossible to build a Forth which can deal with all the motherboard
>in a uniform way.
>
>The next best approach was to replace the Video BIOS ROM on the video display
>card. This can be done uniformly, because the motherboard BIOS calls the Video
>BIOS after the motherboard is completely initialized, and that the Video BIOS
>is always located at C0000H. This strategy worked, and I was able to boot up
>eForth on a bare-bone 486 motherboard with an Award BIOS ROM. We still need to
>test it on other motherboards.
>
>You will find reports on these three project in this volume. In addition I
>included two papers I presented at the 1996 Rochester Forth Conference held in
>Toronto in June. Laws of Computing tries to summarize the principles of
>programming and prove that Forth is the best programming language. We all know
>that, but it is nice to prove it from the first principles. Now, we have the
>first principles and the proof. Traffic Controller and Zen of State Machine is
>my answer to the Programming challenger presented at the Forth Day Conference
>at the Silicon Valley FIG Chapter. The most amazing discovery was that Forth
>is the perfect language to program state machines. No new words or new concept
>outside the F-PC are necessary.
>
>Remember ShBoom? It is now being developed by Patriot Scientific Corporation
>in Poway, CA. George Shaw was invited to SVFIG to talk about it and he
>distributed data sheets, which are reproduced here. Klaus Schleisiek also
>visited SVFIG and gave a talk on his new Forth chip IX. His handout is also
>included.
>
>Several users requested RTX processor and it reminded me what a nice
>microprocessor it is. I am still distributing the RTX kit. If you have an
>application which requires fast and precisely timed reponse from the computer,
>RTX with cmForth is still the best answer.
>
>Just before the Volume 21 goes to the printer, I worked out the logic design of
>a 16 bit microprocessor P16, modeled after Chuck Moore's MuP21. A paper is
>appended to the end of this volume. P16 design is in standard schematics and
>had passed logic simulation. It demonstrates my understanding of the P21
>architecture and its logic operations.
>
>Dr. C. H. Ting Offete Enterprise
>San Mateo, California 1306 South B Street
>October, 1996 San Mateo, CA 94402
> (415)574-8250, Fax (415)571-5004
>
>New Products from Offete Enterprises:
>
>4121 More on Forth Engines, Volume 21, $20
>Editor's Notes
>New products from Offete Enterprises
>MuP21H Kit
>My Troubles with This Darn 82C51
>CT100 Lab Board
>Born to be Free
>Laws of Computing
>Traffic Controller and Zen of State Machines
>ShBoom Microprocessor
>Programmable Fieldbus Controller IX1
>Logic Design of a 16-Bit Microprocessor P16
>
>4018 MuP21H Chip in PLCC, $40
>MuP21 is now available in 44-pin PLCC packages. It has much smaller (1/3)
>footprint compared to DIP, and is suitable for surface mount..
>4019 MuP21H Evaluation Kit, $100
>Include PLCC MuP21H, a printed circuit board, a 128KB EPROM with eForth V2.08,
>instructions and assembler diskette. Build your own stand-alone MuP21
>development system with 82C51 UART.
>4020 Assembled MuP21H Evaluation Kit, $250
>MuP21 system with 1Mx20 DRAM, 128KB EPROM eForth V2.08, and 82C51 UART to talk
>to PC host. Apply 5V power and it generates NTSC signals to drive a color TV
>monitor. Manual, MuP21 assembler and sample code included to guide application
>development.
>4012 Assembled MuP21 Evaluation Kit, $350, $250
>MuP21 system with 1Mx20 DRAM, 128KB EPROM, and 8-bit parallel I/O ports. Apply
>5V power and it generates NTSC signals to drive a color TV monitor. Manual,
>MuP21 assembler and sample code included to guide application development.
>Note price reduction due to DRAM price drop.
>1014 MuP21 Programming Manual, C. H. Ting-- $25.00
>Second Edition with MuP21H update. Primary reference for MuP21 microprocessor.
>Architecture, instruction set, video coprocessor programming, assembler,
>bootstrap code, Chuck Moore's OK demonstration system, and his lectures on P21
>and OK.
>9008 CT-100 Lab Board, $400.00
>This board is manufactured in Taiwan to train students in microcontroller
>interfacing. It has 8051 as the CPU, surrounded by interesting devices like
>LED and LCD displays, ADC, DAC, stepper motor controller, key array and
>keyboard, buzzer, etc. It provides enough materials for a one semester
>microcontroller course at college level. Students can get on to the
>experiments directly without having to worry about hardware assembly. Manual
>is available separately as Item #2132.
>2132 CT100 Lab Board User Manual, C. H. Ting--$20.00
>CT-100 is a 8051 based microcontroller training system, with integrated
>peripherals like LED and LCD displays, keys and keyboard input, ADC. DAC,
>stepper motor controller, relays, RS232, 8255, and 8279 peripherals. This
>manual details experiments using 8051 Forth to controller these devices.
>2133 32-Bit 386 eForth V.4.02, C. H. Ting--$25.00
>This is a 32 bit implementation of eForth for 80386 in the protected mode.
> It enters into protected mode directly without a DOS extender. Only COM1 is
>active at 9600 baud. Keyboard, screen and disks are all silenced. You need
>another PC to serve as a host through the serial port.
>2134 32-Bit 386 eForth V.4.03, C. H. Ting--$25.00
>This is a 32 bit implementation of eForth for 80386 in the protected mode.
> It replaces the Video BIOS at C0000H and booted by system BIOS. It converts
>a 386/486 motherboard to an embedded Forth processor, communicating with a PC
>through the COM1 port..
>
>
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