Hi Stephen,
Sorry to use your Fig Forth thread - I too have a Corsham 6809 system, with
a SD card - I can not for the life of me figure out what files / how to put
stuff onto the SD card to boot - either Basic or Flex/09.
If you had success down the Fig route that would also be great - but do you
remember how to use the SD system?
Kindest regards,
Doug Jackson
em: doug(a)doughq.com
ph: 0414 986878
Follow my amateur radio adventures at
On Sun, 24 Jun 2018 at 05:16, Stephen Pereira via cctech <
cctech(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Hi folks,
I know there's not much 6800 activity here, but I figure this would be
worth a try.
Has anyone here ever seen or ever had fig-FORTH for the 6800 working?
I have a SWTPC replica system from Bob Applegate / Corsham Technologies,
and I love it. It came with a complete 64K RAM, as well as the SWIBUG
monitor, and the monitor code has been extended by Bob/Corsham to interface
with an SD Card sub-system for floppy disk emulation. This provides the
original terminal access to the machine with the simple system monitor, and
also the FLEX OS for running programs. It is a blast to use.
Recently, I took a look around and found the fig-FORTH listing as
originally published back in 1979, and also a Source Forge site that holds
an electronic copy:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/asm...th_6800-stuff/ <
https://sourceforge.net/projects/asm68c/files/fig-forth_6800-stuff/>
I've managed to get the source code to assemble with a cross-assembler
supplied by Bob/Corsham. It does not produce an exact copy of the original
code, because the code uses the JMP instruction pretty much exclusively,
and the assembler substitutes a relative BRA instruction sometimes. So my
code ends up being several bytes shorter because of saving one byte each
time a JMP is replaced by a BRA. That said, it appears to me that the code
matches up with the original listing otherwise.
So my problem is this: When I run the code on my system, fig-FORTH seems
to sign on, and will accept input from the keyboard (double echos of each
key typed) but it then does not proceed to interpret the command entered.
The interesting thing I see by winding my way around in the code is that it
has already properly performed a bunch of setup and produces the initial
"Forth-68" sign on, and that has required it to already be using many of
the Forth commands that were defined by machine language. This indicates to
me that some of the command interpretation is working. The I/O from/to the
terminal is by calls to the system monitor I/O routines, and that seems to
be also working, despite the double echos of the typed characters. It just
does not proceed to interpret what is typed in at all.
Of course, I have no idea if this code ever worked properly, or if I am
encountering early buggy code. So I'm looking to see if anyone else has
ever seen the fig-FORTH working on a 6800 system? Any pointers to good
working code?
Thanks for listening!
smp
- - -
Stephen Pereira
Bedford, NH 03110
KB1SXE