Dead simple colorforth install on OSX...

Greetings-

I haven't done much more with colorforth than 4 5 +, so there could be
trouble ahead, but in retrospect, getting it to run on OSX was amazingly
easy. Maybe everyone knows this stuff, but I'll share my experience
because it's brief.

Get Q:

Go here <http://www.kju-app.org/kju/> and get the stable build of Q, a
cocoa version of Qemu. It's a .dmg, so all you do is mount and drag to
your Applications folder.

Get Terry Loveall's Qemu-friendly colorforth release:

Get this <http://modest-proposals.com/qemu-c4-800x600.tgz> and unpack
it.

(Thanks to Neal Bridges' Quartus Wiki for the qemu-c4 URL!)

Install:

Run Q. It should make a folder called QEMU in your Documents folder. Put
Terry's unpacked colorforth folder inside QEMU.

From the Q Control window, hit + to create a new OS. Make the operating
system DOS. Under "General" I set clock to host time and enabled
networking. Under "Hardware" I set platform to "x86 PC", RAM to 32mb,
video to Cirrus Logic. The rest of the items I left in their default
state.

Under "Floppy" select "Choose image file" and go to Terry's folder that
you put in ~/Documents/QEMU. Select "c4.img" for the floppy image.

I set a 10mb compressed hard disk, no CD, and boot from floppy.

I didn't set anything on the advanced tab.

Click "Create PC" and run the OS from Q Control. DOS should boot and by
typing "dir", you should see C4.COM, IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM.

Type "C4" and colorforth should run!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Getting this to work required about 15 minutes worth of fiddling. The
biggest issue was getting  the memory requirement straight. I had
started with 16mb, but went to colorforth.com when nothing happened. The
statement there about 32mb did the trick!

Q/QEMU is an amazing CPU hog, however. My activity monitor shows 70-80%
of my CPU given over to Q/QEMU, even when doing nothing.

Jeff Fox's recent post about the keyboard was helpful in knowing what to
hit to get colorforth to do something. The colorforth "Alt" key maps to
Alt on my Macintosh, which is a not-too-ergonomic Shift-Option with the
left hand. Not what Chuck Moore had in mind, I imagine!)

Hope this helps somebody. Thanks to Ray St. Marie for encourgaing me to
just try "any colorforth".

Best, Charles Turner

<[email protected]>