Introduction
It is no
necessarily evident to have the card physically
to implement the real-time FORTH kernel presented in this site.
Most of the personal computers (MAC or PC) benefit from a very
important power of calculation, it is interesting to use it for
emulate the other machines without too much loss of performance.
The firs
emulator of the mini FORTH systemii was developed by a
virtuoso of the PC world, FBROTON, who realized a program extremely
complete and easy to install under Windows. It has very acceptable
performances when it is installed on a PC with Pentium III processor.
Furthermore, machine man interface is very simple of use wha
makes it accessible to every person not too much exloss in data
processing.
Problem with this
emulator, it is that it is only operational
on PC under Windows, what is not too annoying knowing that i
is the operating system which is installed on most of the existing
computers. On the other hand, for a person as I for example, who
have a MAC, it is necessary to use a PC emulator to use this emulator.
This adds a software layer which degrades enormously and so very
unpleasantly performances.
MAC world has
just evolved considerably with the new operating
system MAC OS X integrating a kernel UNIX. This makes it compatible
with workstations SUN and even with PC although they are equipped
with the operating system LINUX. As APPLE had the brilliant idea
to supply the development software packages in his new operating
system, I was able to realize an emulator which, after light adaptation
of the compilation script, showed itself operational on a SUN
station and even on a PC under LINUX.
This was the
first step of my emulator which was operational
in terminal mode. For the graphic interface, a solution UNIX exists:
OpenGL (http://www.opengl.org/).
This standard allows to have very powerful graphic routines on
any UNIX machine as an extension of the C language.