colorForth Status

Updated 2002 September

# Philosophy

My attitude about software is that it expresses ideas that cannot be owned. Attempting to assert ownership is undesirable and impossible.

So, although colorForth is infinitely valuable, I place it in the Public Domain to make it freely available to anyone for any purpose. There is plenty of money to be made by porting code, programming applications and teaching.

I am having a fine time using colorForth. I won't spend much time promoting it. This site is my attempt to gauge the market. I will rigidly control the version I use.

# Download

The 2001 July 31 version is available for download.

# Chuck

This is what I'm working on, priority on top.

- PPP/TCP
- Go
- Code colorForth in colorForth
- PCI Audio: send data to the D/A, get samples from the A/D

# Projects

Here's a list of colorForth code I'd like to have. I'll post the best code with credit to the author.

- Graphics
  - Triangle
  - Circle
  - Cube
  - Cylinder
  - Sphere
  - Modecules
  - Star map
  - Fractal tree
  - Mandlebrot set
  - Wood grain
  - Grass
  - Ray trace
- Audio
  - Play .wav
  - Record voice
  - Analyse voice - extract phonemes
  - Recognize voice
  - Identify voice
  - Synthesize voice
- Devices - Hardware interfaces require information not readily available. Intel publishes excellent specs. Others consider them proprietary. Agreeing to non-disclosure might prevent distributing source. Reverse-engineering Linux code seems the only way.
  - Various graphic accelerators
    - Frame swapping
    - Transparent characters
    - Solid rectangle
    - Solid triangle
    - Z buffer
  - Various audio accelerators
    - Play .wav
    - Record
  - Various modems
- Protocols
  - PPP connection
    - Single ISP
    - 2 blocks?
  - TCP/IP
    - 3 blocks?
  - USB
    - Keyboard
    - Camera
    - Disk
    - 2 blocks + 1/device?
  - JPEG decoder/encoder
  - PNG
    - Encoder - 3 blocks, Chuck Moore
    - Decoder
  - GIF decoder/encoder

# Platforms

Although I have no particular interest in other platforms, colorForth could easily be ported. The kernel that needs to be recoded is quite small. The major difficulty is gaining experience with the computer and its interfaces. These have been suggested:

- Mac
- Sun
- Playstation 2
- PDA