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full-featured colorForth ISO now available
colorForth is a dialect of Forth that uses color to replace punctuation. It is its own operating system, user interface, and development system (editor and compiler) on a small fraction of a floppy disk.
Since the author released his work into the public domain in 2001, several hobbyists and enthusiastic programmers have contributed to the development. This ISO image, part of the cfdos4 alpha-0.02 release, contains Conway's Game of Life, Mark Slicker's awesome Mandelbrot display program, and support for several devices including a partial TCP/IP stack.
This is an alpha quality release; it is recommended to test on a system without a hard drive. The applications were added to a relatively new kernel which uses VESA graphics and BIOS disk access; this should make colorForth runnable on many more systems than it could previously, but the kernel is largely untested, particularly with this large collection of applications.
2007-04-30 00:23:15 UTC by jcomeau_ictx
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Run colorForth natively from CDROM
Release alpha-0.05 of cf_emu now includes an ISO image (ISOLinux/FreeDOS) with a modified COLOR.COM to demo colorForth to those who, up to now, have not been able to run the program natively. It should run on most modern x86 systems. The modification was to squeeze the Mandelbrot set into the first 63K by overwriting some of the code of the CM2001 image (Print, PNG, and LZ77).
Soon we should be able to release a fairly full-featured CDROM which boots directly into colorForth; no need for ISOLinux nor FreeDOS. But we ran into problems, so this is a "teaser" release.
colorForth is a very tiny development system which includes its own operating system and UI.
2007-04-26 06:51:14 UTC by jcomeau_ictx
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alpha-0.04 of cf_emu released
colorForth is a public domain operating system, development environment, and user interface that runs from a single floppy disk.
This SourceForge project is an attempt to extend the reach of Chuck Moore's code to more computers. It uses BIOS calls to load disk blocks and set video modes. It still does require a VESA card which supports a linear framebuffer at 800x600 or 1024x768 resolution.
This release runs on the "big 3" emulators: VMWare, QEMU, and Bochs, in order of best performance, and it should run on any x86 PC that meets the minimum video hardware requirement above.
You will find in this release an installer executable that unpacks both colorforth images and a slow version of Bochs for testing only. It also creates shortcuts on your desktop for the 3 emulators, but you must download those from their respective websites or FTP servers.
2007-04-12 08:31:55 UTC by jcomeau_ictx
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alpha-0.02 cf_emu released
This is a bugfix release of cf_emu, the native colorForth binaries with shortcuts to your preexisting installations of Bochs, QEMU, and VMware Player.
colorForth is an operating system, user interface, and development environment occupying a small part of a floppy disk.
This bugfix was for the Mandelbrot display application included in the previous release. It is now possible to zoom without losing your place in the complex number plane, and the alt key, which is necessary to release the keyboard from the emulators to make a screenshot, no longer affects the image (it was previously the "zoom in" key).
These images have also been "burned" to floppy disks and booted on real hardware, and can also be run as a COMfile from MS-DOS, using the 63K color.com at http://colorforth.sourceforge.net/jc2007/. Due to size restrictions on COMfiles, this image does not include the Mandelbrot application.
2007-04-06 05:08:17 UTC by jcomeau_ictx
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updated installer for 3 emulations
The newest release, cf_emu, creates 4 desktop shortcuts, for VMware Player (the fastest), QEMU (second fastest), Bochs-2.3, and Bochs compiled from CVS sources. The first two and the last use the 1024x768 image, and Bochs-2.3 uses 800x600 since I couldn't get fullscreen mode to work with that.
2007-04-04 05:06:33 UTC by jcomeau_ictx
