Notes from August 2003 Meeting


Morning Session

    Line drawing and polygon filling engines by CH Ting
  • Line drawing engine uses 5 subtracters, multiplexers, add/subtracter
  • Horizontal drawing engine
  • Polygon filling engine
  • Circle drawing program

Afternoon Session

    VCF presentation thoughts:
  • Why use Forth in a "vintage" environment? - Kevin and Dave
    • as an emulator
    • as an assembler
    • as a tethered development tool
  • Forth's differences from C
  • As a possible handout include a printed data sheet of Forth Resources or a CD with HTML bookmarks and:
    • WinForth
    • eForth
    • Tutorials
  • Demonstrations:
    • fingerspelling hand - Dave
    • ultrasonic wheelchair video - Dave
    • tethered Forth system - Ting
  • Dwight's presentation abstract:
    Using Forth to Transfer Data from Vintage Machines
    This presentation with describe methods of transferring data from vintage computer systems that have unique non-compatible disk formats. In particular, data has been recovered from a Heathkit H89 with a hard-sector formatted USART-encoded floppy disk and transferred to a PC over a serial interface. Forth was employed on the PC side and assembly language on the H89.

Kalifer Diel Website


Events:

09/06 Surplus Computers Parking Lot Sale

09/14 Comedy Day in Golden Gate Park


Misc

SmartDraw
Free trial download
Standard Edition $ 69
Professional $129
Professional Plus $198

Meme: A Virtual Reality System written in Forth

Paul Frenger (an MD using Forth) wrote an article about Meme in ACM SIGPLAN in June 2003.

Immersive Systems Inc. offers it free

Metatopia Project

Meme is written in plain-vanilla C, so it ports to any machine with an ANSI-compliant C compiler.

"The source to Meme and Metatopia comes from three donors. Mitch Bradley of Firmworks (http://www.firmworks.com) donated the interpreter on which Meme is based. Marc de Groot of Immersive Systems, Inc. (http://www.immersive.com) worked on Meme for 20,000 hours to bring it to its current state. Master Zap (http://www.master-zap.com) implemented Metatopia, as well as a number of demos featured on the website..."