FORTH for the SHARP PC-E500 (S)

[robve]

(11-06-2021 10:40 AM)Klaus Overhage Wrote:  Do you want to describe the use of UUDECODE and LOADM as a second way for PC-E500 with 64K or more? You could/should extend the expanded version of the Forth500.bin by 16 bytes with BINTOPCE.EXE and convert it into a UUE file with UUENCODE.EXE, which you can enclose.

Thanks for the info, this helps. Yes, I want to include two FORTH500.UUE files, one for an expanded E500(S) and one for an unexpanded E500(S). These EXE programs are great, but I'm not much of a Windows user and often end up rewriting EXE programs myself in bash scripts or in C/C++. I'm pretty sure that UUENCODE.EXE converts the binary with the extra 16 bytes to the standard uuencode format. There is software available to convert. On the other hand, the FORTH500.UUE file that we require may perhaps include other data (besides the 16 bytes) produced by UUENCODE.EXE. Such extra data may be required to decode the file on the receiving end. Since I don't have a serial cable yet and can't try this out to verify if it works, I'll stick to using BINTOCPE.EXE and UUENCODE.EXE for the time being. I will include the serial transfer information in the READMEs and add the UUE files to the Forth500 GitHub repo.

Some good news!

I've updated Forth500 to fix the long line editing glitches. Lines up to 255 characters long are now editable without issues. To do so I had to rewrite a core part of the editor from scratch.

In the meantime I also added an FVALUE definition with corresponding TO for completeness (and FVALUE? (FVAL) and (FTO) words).

Despite these additions, the new Forth500 executable is 93 bytes shorter (20236 bytes)

- Rob