FORTH

[Anthony]

Much to the amazement and amusement of many of my customers I use an Atari 800 for all of my invoicing and accounting. I wrote a complete general ledger system in FORTH which is about 32k in size and it outperforms anything I can find for my obligatory PIII WinThing and it hasn't crashed in the 12 years it has been running. My question, is anyone using FORTH on their Atari? another, is anyone using their Atari for non-gaming purposes?

[Tempest]

I've never used FORTH myself, but I know several 7800 games were written in it. Tom Sloper told me that the guy who did Choplifter, Karateka, and one other game (Hat Trick?) did them in FORTH. That would explain why they suck...

 

I started to use my Atari 800 and the Assembler Editor cartridge to make my 5200 game (I wanted to go totally retro), but I quickly abandoned that idea. It was just too difficult (and completely unnessicary). I seriously doubt anyone is using anything earlier than an Atari ST for productivity anymore. ST's are still used by music people because they have kick ass music software and abilities.

 

Tempest

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tempest:

I started to use my Atari 800 and the Assembler Editor cartridge to make my 5200 game (I wanted to go totally retro), but I quickly abandoned that idea. It was just too difficult (and completely unnessicary). I seriously doubt anyone is using anything earlier than an Atari ST for productivity anymore. ST's are still used by music people because they have kick ass music software and abilities.

---

 

While the ST certainly did have its heyday in the professional music scene, I bet you'd be hard pressed finding very many that are still using one. Of course, the best use of those MIDI ports on the Atari ST is for kick-ass games of MIDI Maze. Man, that game has to be the first, true, networked, multiplayer Deathmatch. With a smile.

 

..Al

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tempest:

I've never used FORTH myself, but I know several 7800 games were written in it. Tom Sloper told me that the guy who did Choplifter, Karateka, and one other game (Hat Trick?) did them in FORTH. That would explain why they suck...

---

 

I've also somehow managed to avoid FORTH all the years I've been programming, but I'm not complaining. I can't even imagine writing a *game* in FORTH, especially for a console system! I have to wonder if these were compiled into assembly or there's a FORTH interpreter running on the machine. Scary thought, it makes my brain hurt.

 

..Al

[Callipygous]

Cutter, what Forth are you using?

 

Seem to recall reading that Atari Arcade games were done in Forth and cross-assembled on a DEC VAX. Of course, memory may fail me and this may be all wrong .

[Anthony]

Hello MOB,

 

I guarantee you've never heard of our "DatFORTH" as we only made 9 copies. Following a FORTH convention in Sunnyvale California we started writing a FORTH82 Rochester standard kernel. The obvious choice for such a project had to be FORTH79 as we were true born again zealots....wrong, it was huge.

 

Using what apparently is termed Redmond programming we had FORTH82 sitting on top of FORTH79 glued together with some of the ugliest code imaginable. Eventually we rewrote it with an assembler and our naked boot is just over 8k.

 

Your memory is not failing, not just Atari coin-ops but most of the others were programmed with FORTH. It's biggest appeal being the somewhat trivial task of cross compiling your programme into anything your customer wants, not just the platform but you could also provide source code if they want in any language they want to use to maintain the programme.

 

When I was at that convention I met several coin-op and home computer game writers but few Atari owners. The big dispute at that convention was whether a FORTH release would be allowed a "standard" designation if used on top of an operating system. Using a file sytem severely hampers FORTHs ability to cross compile, no longer a trivial project.

 

The move to OS based FORTH was the death knell for this language on home computers and it is now only used for coding robots and appliances. I heard it was popular in the cell phone business but I have no verification of this rumour.

 

-------------

 

Hello Al,

 

I hope this doesn't sound condescending but I don't believe there is such a thing as FORTH interpreter, the concept is certainly very amusing though. All compiled languages run on processor specific native code. You don't need the FORTH compiler to run your compiled FORTH programme any more than you would need your assembler cart to run an assembled programme.

 

There really is no such concept as programming in FORTH. It works in much the same way as Linux, allowing one to put scripts and strings of commands together and name them for execution. As with Linux you can use any language you want to compile these scripts if you are not comfy with the fundamental Linux commands.

 

When programming with FORTH you can change language as you go. I have a 6502 assembler code compiler included in my boot compiler which has always been included but not required by the standards. If you need to write assembly for a routine that requires rapid execution you just notify the compiler at that point of the programme and change language.

 

You can also add such things as a BASIC compiler and a C compiler or even stuff like LOGO and LISP. The novelty of such usually wears off very quickly with FORTH familiarity.

 

The beauty of this is the ability to test stuff as you go. Any routine that you need to test can be executed from the compiler and you don't end up writing code that doesn't work or produces unexpected results. Anyone who has written code that had to be debugged can see an advantage here

 

----------------

 

Hello Tempest,

 

I've seen pretty good games written in just about every language imaginable I've also seen sucky ones too. I think the programmer is the weakest link

 

 

Cutter

[Tempest]

Oh most definetly. The programmer who did those games wasn't very good and was constantly behind schedule (at least according to Tom). I wasn't slamming FORTH really (I've never used it), I've just heard it wasn't one of the best languages out there.

 

Tempest

[Callipygous]

Cutter,

Thanks for the confirmation on coin-op dev and the explanation of Forth. Think I understand it a little better now. You can include software like the Assem Editor in with the Forth compile. What about hardware chips? For instance, to develop for the 8-bit on some other machine, wouldn't someone have to develop routines to emulate Antic and Pokey ?

[Anthony]

Hello Tempest,

 

FORTH was quite a departure from any programming environment used at the time and the very foreign approach gave rise to many deprecators that had not explored the potential. The most horrifying thing to see is that the programmer appears to be making up keywords and syntax as he goes along willy nilly. It gets worse when you notice there is no concept of files supported and you get to put anything you want anywhere on a disk that you feel like.

 

The advantage of FORTH over every other available language is the ability to code in your language of choice on the fly. Even ASM purists can use the FORTH compiler and their source code will produce an identical object code to any other ASM only compiler. The same goes for any other language you might want to use. The lack of a file management system means that you can save your compiled code as a boot, or a file that will respond to any DOS you care to write for.

 

FORTH doesn't use the computer memory for much of anything in the Compiler, the source code is created on disc as you write it so if you decide try out a tricky routine that turns out to be an infinite loop you haven't lost anything you've written and remembering to save as you go is not required.

 

There is not a lot of point in playing with FORTH these days but you can get a good feel of the kind of power if you use command line Linux. This too gives you the ability to programme cross platform, OS and language applications, not that I do much of that sort of thing. I only write for my own convenience and amusement

 

-------------------------

 

Hello MOB,

 

You don't really need emulators for chips or hardware unless you are testing routines and it wouldn't make sense to try a test on a non target computer. Hardware communicates predictable data from known locations so you would only need to write or read them in your programme so it doesn't really matter if they exist or are emulated. You just write and compile to the ROM or disc of the target.

 

cutter

[_The Doctor__]

Much to the amazement and amusement of many of my customers I use an Atari 800 for all of my invoicing and accounting. I wrote a complete general ledger system in FORTH which is about 32k in size and it outperforms anything I can find for my obligatory PIII WinThing and it hasn't crashed in the 12 years it has been running. My question, is anyone using FORTH on their Atari? another, is anyone using their Atari for non-gaming purposes?

Did anyone happen to get his Atari 800 General ledger program and preserve it?

[Kyle22]

Did anyone happen to get his Atari 800 General ledger program and preserve it?

I certainly hope so. I have been looking for something like this.

[+slx]

Record necrobump? 15 years!

[haightc]

This dead thread bumps can be kind of nice for those us who have been out of the atari computer scene for a long time, almost 20 years for me. Forth is actually a neat language, I never really used until I was getting more in my Sun SPARCstations. I have then set up for my home brewery automation and testing processes.

[+MrFish]

Apparently, 2001 was the first year of AtariAge's existence.

 

Check out how it originally looked here on the WayBack Machine:

 

AtariAge: May 17, 2001

 

Earlier dates in 2001 show the site under various stages of construction.

[+MrFish]

OK, that's not entirely correct; Atariage started in 1998, but under the name "Atari 2600 Nexus". 2001 was the "relaunch" with the new name, and when Al joined the team:

 

2001 About Page

 

Anyway, cool to see some of these ancient pages.

Edited March 24, 2017 by MrFish

[ricortes]

hehe, 1997 Wayback archive. Not sure when the archive or my web page started but obviously by 1997. Netmagic ran under some early version of Linux IIRC. I did have versions of Windows 1-3.x but I think W95 was the first commonly available OS with IE that you could view web pages with. I did have a Linux box that I installed a Mozilla on but it never got heavy use back then. Pretty sure I only had something like a 20 meg hard drive on it so I never really committed to using it much.

 

I remember some of the place<Not much there!> was hand rolled HTML and all the files were put there via FTP. Man 20 years! Probably half the Internet users today weren't even born yet.

https://web.archive.org/web/19970707134548/http://www.netmagic.net/~ricortes/

[danwinslow]

I wrote a 'Simon' game in ValForth, I liked it a lot and it was extremely fast.