Re: Working with Colorforth

Howerd here:  

Hi Nick,

I have been unable to post  to the
[email protected] mail
list for a long time.

I tried to contact the webmaster, but with no effect.

I think it is to do with me changing my email client
and reply address
- I don't know what I registered as...

Maybe other people have this problem too, or maybe
its because
Intellisys has drained all of the colorForth
resources ;)



The John Comeau USB BIOS interface is tantalisingly
close to working.
He produced two versions, one that boots via a DOS
boot system (that
runs), and one that boots directly by using the BIOS
to read from a USB
flash disk, emulating a floppy (that doesn't run on
my hardware). John
says that the only difference in the binary image is
to do with the
type of boot (a value in the boot sector). The system
is probably one
bit away from booting and running from USB, but I
can't fix it without
re-doing all of John's work - installing assembler,
BOCHS or whatever,
Linux/Cygwin etc etc. I don't have time right now to
do that, so its on
my back burner...

At least I know now that we can access 16 bit BIOS
calls from
the 32 bit CF environment, in "unreal" mode.



I am reaching a point where I can do some more CF
work, so anything you
are doing is very interesting...



Best wishes,



Howerd  8^)


Quoting Nick Maroudas <[email protected]>:

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