Last night or this morning (it's all a blur) I managed to make a boot disk of colorForth using the OEM CD-ROM disc builder assistant tools at FDOS.org. And I had to change my sources to pack the Mandelbrot program into the 63K of a COM file, but then when I booted and ran the CD, guess what? It goes no noticeably faster than it did under VMware. I was expecting an order-of-magnitude or more improvement, but no, VMware apparently optimizes so well as to make its virtual machine run as fast as the host box. Amazing.
I still have yet to make colorForth boot natively, although the El Torito spec seems to make it a no-brainer once you have a usable floppy image. It fails on the 'rep movsd' in the read routine, haven't yet figured out why. Makes no sense, really.
last updated 2013-01-10 20:52:05. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com