How to extend colorForth characters

[ToshiTeru HOMMA]

I understand there are 48 characters in colorForth. I'd like to know what is a recommended way to extend characters in colorForth to include Asian characters, such as CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) characters, or Unicode (UTF-8).

[Dennis Ruffer]

If you have source code for the kernel that you can recompile, it might be possible, but as shipped from Green Arrays (http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/support/index.html#software), the character bitmaps occupy memory from 0x00203000 to 0x00204800. That’s room for only 128 characters in 24x16 bit images.

 

Then, there will be keyboard and huffman encoding issues to deal with. All of which are “simple matters of programming” (smops), but what you will end up with will be very different from Chuck’s original. Not that this is a bad thing, but as with other efforts to change cf in the past, your changes would be standing alone.

 

You can take a look at my ColorForth Assembler/Disassembler at: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49100658/cfasdis.zip

 

Best of luck to you, but you should know that this will not be easy to accomplish.

 

DaR

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[Ray St. Marie]

HI Toshi and welcome to the colorforth group.

Things are a bit slow here and we usually use the forth usenet comp.lang.forth, but we do indeed use this too. :)

I was waiting for Dennis to answer first, because he's your man when it comes to the character conversions. ( thanks for responding Dennis :) )

I've done a few things to extend my own local colorforth characterset and I can share that with you but first I need to know what version of colorforth you are using.

What I've done is to add another location in memory for more characters, made a copy of ICONS with a different address for that extention. Made a word 'nicons' that is an adder to point to the new location, and used the new NICONS editor to edit my own symbols font.

If that sounds interesting to you, please tell me what version of colorforth/arrayforth you are using and then I will be glad to share with you what I have and to point out some things about arrayforth that can help you in your project.

Again, thanks for joining :)

( hmm. I've not personally looked at comp.lang.forth in a very long time and endeavor to correct that )

--Best to you,

Ray

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Raymond St. Marie ii,
public E-mail Ray.s...@gmail.com

[Ray St. Marie]

Dear Group and especially Toshi

I worked this problem that Toshi introduced a bit more today.

First I want to welcome Dennis Ruffer as a co-owner of the group along with the actual owner, P.K. Sharma and myself the owner/manager. Dennis has full controls and I am banking on his ability to respond faster than I do. Thanks Dennis for agreeing to participate in that capacity.

I remembered something that Tim Neitz did when he created multi-windowed colorforth, similar to what Unix users are familiar with having the ability to use the Fnum(F1-F6 iirc for colorforth) keys to switch windows.

The interesting thing that Tim did was to move the load block from 18 to somewhere in the block 60's to allow for room to add his code.

If we do something similar with the help of Greg Baily who controls arrayforth code, that is make room for more icons by moving the load block, then that part of the problem is solved. Leaving the problems of adding more keyboard modes to accommodate more icons, and also the changes to the compressor/decompressor ( trivial ) to accomplish the complete task, that I know of.

We just await word from Greg and his opinion.

You are now as up-to date as I am on the problem.

Thanks again Dennis! and thanks group for reading this,

Ray

[pk s]

On Oct 28, 2015 6:14 AM, "Ray St. Marie" <ray.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Group and especially Toshi
>
> I worked this problem that Toshi introduced a bit more today.

didn't see any details from toshi here

>
> First I want to welcome Dennis Ruffer as a co-owner of the group along with the actual owner, P.K. Sharma and myself the owner/manager. Dennis has full controls and I am banking on his ability to respond faster than I do. Thanks Dennis for agreeing to participate in that capacity.
>

my thanks to dennis too  .. welcome dennis :-)

and to you too for bringing him in

.....

>
> You are now as up-to date as I am on the problem.

me too ;-)

>
> Thanks again Dennis! and thanks group for reading this,
> Ray
>

....

>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>> Best of luck to you, but you should know that this will not be easy to accomplish.
>>>
>>>  

good news is that it IS possible !

.. pk

[Ray St. Marie]

It may be possible, but it may not be very good. There is a limit on how many characters that will be available. Also, The previous code would have to be re-written in the new language if things like the chip array simulator is a something that the CJK users would like to have.

If it's a matter of just writing new color/array forth code, then that's possible now by just makeing the new font in the current editor. But that's limited to 48 icons ( in colorforth 48 more with capitals minus the space and the filled block and the cursor  and in arrayforth those capitals are replaced by a tiny font to fit more simulator on the screen )

So, it comes down to the goal of the original poster. What would they like to accomplish. And that's important to know to give a much more detailed answer at this point. Possible, sure. Maybe not desirable in the end.

:)

Ray

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