Working with Colorforth

Nick here,

The CF blog seems to have gone dead, but if anyone out
there is still listening:  

1. Ray, sorry to hear about your diabetes and resultant
financial problems.  As a small token, I could send
$100 if you could produce code that saves CF on flash
memory card instead of floppy.  USB code for flash is
in Chuck's latest version, but not commented.  John
Comeau has booted CF from CD by omitting floppy
emulation and just saving the basic CF image. I feel
sure that a flash boot would be even simpler, if one
knew one's way around.     

2.  For the record, I have worked with CF for a few
years now, on a hobby project, and am more than
satisfied.  Four X speed (compared to a DOS based ANSI)
 direct PCI access and "self documenting" code all help.

I coded a synthesizer from scratch, that uses a PCI
printer card to to drive a 12 bit parallel DAC
convertor board.  It plays the 4 voices of a string
quartet in perfect tune (though with a toy sound). 
Code is 60 blocks for i/o and sound banks, plus 40
blocks for a  "score" (in this case, the first 29 bars
of Beethoven's  Rasoumovsky Op59/1 ).  No sound card,
no DMA - direct  CPU conversion of each PCM sample in 5
microseconds (which is 4 X faster than CD) on my old 550
MHz PII with a slow Standard Printer Port.  I could
happily spend my remaining years simply refining this
setup (faster PCI card, faster computer, 16 bit DAC,
more elegant layout). 
Thanks to CF, the thing works.   

Caritas, 

Nick
   
-- 
Dr Nicolas George Maroudas
Avigdor Meiri 9/1 
Sea View 
Haifa 3 55 00 
Israel 
Tel +972 048 337 315