MSX with Forth83

Introduction

When you take a clever and exotic language like Forth and adds it up to a really well thought-out computer standard like the MSX you'll get an enjoyable thing to hack. It's a good toy to mess around and learn about hardware and MSX architecture.

It's far from being complete, but I'm sharing what I have so far hoping to encourage others to do their own experiments with the FORTH language in the MSX world. It's fun!

Give it a try, you may like it!!!

Usage

Warning: This is a work in progress. Consider it alpha quality software.

As I don't have a good grasp of the text editor inside Forth, I choose to edit forth source inside a normal text editor and then convert it into BLK file format. I made a simple tool to do this, it's called "4th-txt". It takes text from stdin and generates at stdout text filled with spaces, without CR CR/LF, inside a matrix of 64 rows by 16 cols (what Forth calls a block). To mark blocks, use "----" at the beginning of any line.

The Makefile should create all necessary files, just type:

make all

It should generate all *.blk files inside /dist directory. Just copy them to your Forth83 instalation directory and have fun! Optionally, you could also type

make dsk

to create a bootable HD image with all *.blk files (they are too big to fit in a single floppy) and run it on OpenMSX, WebMSX or even on a real MSX computer if you've got the Sunrise IDE interface. To start OpenMSX with the generated HD image you may type:

make test

I'm using Forth 83 labeled F83v2-80 developed by Henry Laxen and Michael Perry and distributed inside "f83v2-80.ark" (MD5: 8c5017e406add5aa0dcd9e99a2514bc2). I have a mirror of it into https://github.com/janaite/forth83-80

Inside F83, just open the file with:

OPEN filename.blk

After the file was opened, type

OK

the word "OK" will load screen number 1 that will perform a chain load. Just wait, it could be a little time-consuming.

To save a new Forth system with all words compiled inside it, type

SAVE-SYSTEM newname.com

To exit Forth system and return to command shell, type

BYE

Thanks

I would like to thank

• Forth Interest Group (FIG) because of their efforts in Forth's history preservation
• Henry Laxen and Michael Perry for their excellent Forth 83 implementation
• Dr. Chen-hanson Ting for his texts about Forth, almost every reference about Forth83 that I read was written by him.

JANAITE (27-nov-2018)