Re: What's new?

Dear Jason, 

Your account of Forth on Z80 brought back happy memories. In
those cases where I knew enough about the hardware to replace
Basic by Forth, the latter ran 10 times faster. I read
somewhere about a Forth that was almost wholly constructed from
BUILDS/DOES.  Which reminds me:  what is the CF equivalent?
(Perhaps a compiled POP plus yellow/green instructions?) 

My replies to your comments are numbered below.

Quoting Jason Kemp <[email protected]>:

>... " Hi Nick,

>... " [snip]  Intellasys evaluation board
>... " > interesting for music making, but priced around $500
>... " which is
>... " > twice the usual for an EV.
>... " >   
>... " Is there a mail list or news group for that? 

Reply 1:  For the EV board 

          
http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=61&Itemid=74

>... " [snip] . Is there a group for 
>... " Intellasys Forths and have colorForth folk migrated
>... " there?

Reply 2.  There is a blog

          http://www.intellasys.net/phpBB/
 
>... " I’ve just skimmed the VentureForth Programmer’s Guide
>... " and it looks nice, 
>... " but no colour! So VF is a Forth equivalent of OCCAM? 

Reply 3.  Jeff Fox said long ago that there was no color.


>... " Is there a 
>... " colorForth for these chips? 

Reply 4.  I believe (subject to correction) that Chuck has such
a thing.  

>... " I can see these [EVB] would be
>... " great for your 
>... " synthesizer. 

Reply 5.  At that price and at my age, I have to consider. 
Perhaps the price will come down in the last quarter, when they
start to manufacture in quantity; perhaps by then I'll have
some
more spare cash and enthusiasm for new project.  


>... " For me, I still want to master USB and
>... " TCP/IP, so Pentium 
>... " colorForth still seems the best educational approach,
>... " although I was 
>... " getting bogged down in the Pentium machine code which
>... " wouldn’t be a 
>... " problem on an Intellasys chip.

Reply 6.  CF now has very little machine code, once you have
booted it. I guess that there is enough USB source code in CF2
to run native - once one understands the USB/BOOT & TCP/IP
protocols.  But I must confess that I have abandoned hope of
doing this myself in the foreseeable future.   

>... " > But CF on PC has been fun, instructive and useful. 
>... " >   
>... " So far I have found it fun and instructive too, but I
>... " haven’t yet 
>... " managed the ‘useful’!
>... " 
>... " Jason

Reply 7.  I found CF useful because it gave me control of PCI
bus and a 3 fold increase of speed - just what I needed to test
my onesy notion of building a synth with high speed parallel
DAC
at a time when commercial soundcards were limited to 44-48k Hz.
(See my reply to Mathew Vaded).

Caritas,

Nick

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Why rob a bank when you can own a bank?  -  US Proverb 

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