Whew. I've been in "hack mode" since my last blog entry, trying to get colorForth to boot on Bochs. Now, colorForth is very minimalistic but it assumes the ability of the FDC to work in non-DMA mode. Bochs's doesn't. I tried adding the capability, despite my poor skills in C++ and my lack of knowledge of FDC hardware, relying on Google to fill in the blanks. After I started making some progress, I found Alex Thiel's patch which possibly worked for some things, but I couldn't get it to work with the current CVS revision, even after hand-patching. So I went back to my own hacking, and finally came up with this patch, which doesn't interrupt every byte as it's supposed to (and as Alex's does), but at least enables colorForth to read in its virtual disk. This configuration file builds a Bochs similar to the 2.3 release for Windows.
Anyway, now it dies trying to access some unavailable PCI hardware, or perhaps the AGP card, which as yet Bochs doesn't emulate. So either I hack colorForth, or add AGP to Bochs, or forget about it for now. Hopefully the latter... I really need some sleep. These all-nighters are getting to me.
last updated 2013-01-10 20:49:27. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com