Commander X16

Hi Mark, thanks a lot for the feedback; it made me realize two things:

First, we (the VolksForth owners) clearly need to somehow get the old C64 VolksForth manual translated to English. It's in German, and I find it quite good. I learned much of my Forth from it way back, and I think it would answer most of your questions.
But translating it will be a longer-term thing; I myself am in the middle of a multi-year effort of renovating and unifying the code bases of the four VolksForth platforms CBM, AtariST, CP/M and MSDOS. The first and the last are done; CP/M is in the works, AtariST is pending. The X16 VolksForth is one outcome of this larger project. I should be able to provide some pointers how to get started, though.

The second thing is that I have forgotten to pack a lot of things when creating this first github release of VolksForth. For example I didn't pack the 6502assembler.fth which is what you need to load (INCLUDE) to write CODE words. The ASSEMBLER vocabulary in the VolksForth kernel is there to provide some labels, IIUC.

The kernel in general is designed as a minimal core of the system. Everything that can be loaded on top of it has been excluded from the metacompiled kernel and is provided in separate files - or, in the past, in blocks on separate disks.

I'll see what I can do to put together a more complete release, together with at least some documentation and pointers to sample code.

I tested to translate the ”Handbuch” with Google translate. ChatGPT is probably even better. Anyway, these tools are becoming really good. You could save a lot of time just editing minor mistakes instead of manually translating the whole manual.

pzembrod wrote: ↑Tue Dec 19, 2023 9:56 pm
The second thing is that I have forgotten to pack a lot of things when creating this first github release of VolksForth. For example I didn't pack the 6502assembler.fth which is what you need to load (INCLUDE) to write CODE words. The ASSEMBLER vocabulary in the VolksForth kernel is there to provide some labels, IIUC.

The kernel in general is designed as a minimal core of the system. Everything that can be loaded on top of it has been excluded from the metacompiled kernel and is provided in separate files - or, in the past, in blocks on separate disks.

I'll see what I can do to put together a more complete release, together with at least some documentation and pointers to sample code.

How is your more complete release coming along?

I feel an urge to try using the Vera from Forth and then the 6502 assembler is needed, I can read German though so I am going to print the German manual pdf at work but the "some documentation" would be handy.

Hi all, finally an update. I had planned to spend some time on VolksForth around the turn of the year, but then life happened a bit and kept me busy for a while. But now I am close to putting together the next release.

As for completeness of the included sources - it turns out that the sources I thought I had forgotten to pack were actually part of at least the last release after all. But the upcoming release will contain a bit more description of what is included.

Also I've made progress on the overall documentation side. We have a new scan of the German manual now, and I am making progress with OCR, so machine-supported translating it, as Stefan suggested, may be within reach soon. Stefan, I assume you tested translating the file VolksForth-Handbuch.org? Alas that contains only a tiny part of the original manual; let's see how far OCR and machine translation will get us.

I don't really remember, but I might have tested to translate that yes.

Previously I used Google's translate function. It worked OK, and I assume it might have gotten even better.

Nowadays I mainly use AI tools for machine translations. They are getting pretty good, but I expect that you must still read through the translation and fix some mistakes. Even AI can be fooled by old technical terms.

The next release is out now: v3.9.6.

I have finally figured out a way to OCR the original German manual and to use the OCR text for a machine-supported translation; I would say it is working reasonably well. As a first piece I picked the manual chapter about the multitasker, which is a bit of an odd choice, but some of the changes in v3.9.6 affect an aspect of VolksForth's multitasking capability, and for that purpose having the multitasker documentation available seemed useful. It also contains VolksForth's memory map.

Additionally the release contains more sample source files, mostly extracted from the block sources on the original 4 disk images. And the VolksForth kernel should now be pretty robust when new X16 ROM versions are released. The first test it has already passed: I had prepared and published the release unaware that ROM R48 had been released in the meantime, and running the VolksForth tests for v3.9.6 show that it works well under ROM R48.