Getting Started

What do you need to get started? Well at the very very least you would have a serial terminal emulator, but I don't mean those primitive send/receive ones, but a full and proper ANSI terminal emulator such as TeraTerm on Windows or minicom on Linux. These terminals are fast and can handle very high baud rates and ANSI escape sequences that are uses for colors and positioning etc. This is the basics but can I recommend a good code editor that supports syntax hightlighting and integrated terminal windows? Good, I have recently been using Visual Studio Code and I have tried many wonderful editors, but this seems to be the best.

Plug your P2 into the PC and open up the terminal with 115200,8N1 settings and ANSI or VT100 emulation. Now check that it is connected properly by hitting the enter (or CR) key. If all is well you should be greeted by a the TAQOZ# prompt. Hit enter again and if you didn't see it before you will see TAQOZ accept you blank command, acknowledge it, and prompt you once again, like this:

TAQOZ#  ---  ok
TAQOZ# 

What happened here? The TAQOZ# prompt indicates that it is ready for user input and the # indicates that the default radix for input and output is decimal. When you hit the enter it will separate your input from its output with a --- then execute your input, in this case nothing, before reponding with an "ok" all done before reprompting.

Now you are ready since you can talk to TAQOZ, and TAQOZ can talk to you. If you aren't familiar with Forth then try something very basic such as:
12 34 * .
Be sure to use at least a space or more between each number or operator or word. So that is "12 <space> 34 <space> <star> <space> <dot> <enter>". When you hit enter then 12 is converted to a number and pushed onto a data stack, so too with 34 and the star is of course the multiplication operator which takes the last two numbers off the stack, in this case 12 and 34, multiplies them together and pushes the result back onto the stack. Finally to print the result the dot is a common Forth word for printing a number although you can also use the alias word PRINT instead. One's quick and does the job, the other is easy to see and read, it's up to you. </enter></dot></space></star></space></space>

Now try an instant one line program
10 FOR CRLF PRINT" Hello World!" NEXT
Did you like that? Find out what words your version of Tachyon or TAQOZ has in its dictionary that it can understand by typing WORDS.

Now you have started, you have only just started. Try a few of these and figure out what it is doing.
12 34 .S
SWAP .S
0 $100 DUMP
.DISK
lsio

BTW, while Tachyon is case sensitive, if it fails to find a lower case word in the dictionary, it will try again after converting it to upper-case. You can also hit escape to discard the current line or ^C (control+C) to reset Tachyon/TAQOZ.