6800 fig-FORTH?

[Eric Smith]

On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 1:16 PM, Stephen Pereira via cctech <
cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Has anyone here ever seen or ever had fig-FORTH for the 6800 working?
>

In the mid-1980s I know someone with a WaveMate 6800 system. He had
fig-Forth running on FLEX.  At the time I was only interested in the Apple
II, DEC PDP-10, and BSD 4.x on VAX, so I didn't pay much attention to his
system.

I had problems similar to what you describe when I was bringing up the PACE
version of fig-Forth, and tracked down and fixed a serious bug in the
published listing. AFAICT, I am the only person other than the author who
ever ran the PACE version. I found it far easier to debug on a simulator
rather than the real hardware.

The 6800 version must surely have been far more popular than the PACE
version, so it seems somewhat unlikely that there would be a huge defect in
the published listing, but it's not impossible.

I wrote some 68HC11 assembly professionally in the late 1980s, but the only
actual 6800 code I've writen was a 6800 version of the Apple I monitor.
Writing 6800 code after being used to the 68HC11 and 6809 was a huge step
backward; I kept trying to use newer instructions and addressing modes that
the 6800 did not have.  I have a non-working Electronic Product Associates
Micro 68; maybe someday I'll fix it up.

Eric
N2ES