f68kans

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F68KANS a portable Forthsystem for 680x0-computer

Important note:

F68KANS is a open source product, made by a community of sophisticated developers.

What is it about?

F68KANS is an ANSI Forth system for any m680x0 computer. It is highly portable even as a binary image.

This release contains all to run F68KANS on Atari computers and on machines running OS9. All the necessary bits to make F68KANS run on any other machine is also included.

The implementation on Atari machines is highly elaborated. So there is really a lot of stuff usable on Atari only. When you port F68KANS, you will have to decide, what you can or should use. All the thing not located under the ATARI subdirectory are of broader interest, which does not mean that things in this subdirectory are of no interest.

Installation:

Just copy all the stuff from floppy to your harddisk or even leave it on the floppy. Do not forget to make a backup!!

What did you get? What should you have?

I now will try to describe whta is in the distribtution of this release. To keep this part of the documentation flexible, I will only describe files and directories at one level. You can expect README.TXT files in some of the subdirectories describing its contents.

I strongly advice you not to store any of your own sources under the F68KANS subdirectory. This will make it possible for you just to exchange the whole F68KANS directory with the next release. You should think of this possibilty also when you intend to change sources of the distribution. For the same reason you should be careful to use non-standard worsin your application, because there is no garantuee that these words still exist in another release or keep their meaning.

File in F68KANS:

README.TXT

This file.

Sometimes: F68KANS.IMG

This is the binary system image. It contains the most basic part of the system written in assembler. By default, I store it somewhere in the ATARI subdirectory for practical reasons. Look for it, it is important!

Directories in F68KANS:

KERNEL

Here are all the assembler sources of the basic kernel. They will lead to the file F68KANS.IMG. There are some system dependent steps in the generation of F68KANS.IMG, which I do not wnat to explain here, because you never will have to do the generation of the kernel.

SYSFTH

This directory contains Forth sources necessary to build a full featured Forth system from the basic kernel. In this turn, non-ANSI-words are defined as well. You should avoid to any cost to use these words, because they may be a matter of change without notice. Do never rely on them! The only reason to change any of the sources contained in SYSFTH is due to porting the system itself. for application programmers, these files should be considered as read-only.

APPFTH

Here are all sources which are based on ANSI-kernel, but are strongly related to the development environment- Here, e.g. graphics may be defined. So these sources of course may be system dependent. Alter them as a system provider, but do not touch them as an application programmer.

TST

Some files to test the functionality of the thing in SYSFTH and APPFTH. Take them as examples and demos!

ATARI

All the ATARI stuff, especially the ATARI loader, with all its connections to the GEM/TOS operating system. Some project files and utilities of my environment can be found here.