Again, something completely different
The low level work on Blunt, reverse engineering the NewtonOS and digging into ARM assembly led me to a small side project in an area which has tickled my brain since a long time: Forth. It all started with a hard to grasp book by Ekkehard Floegel which I used to browse through in the local computer shop but never bought until quite recently, and a short article on the Jupiter Ace. This led to one a very simple Forth-like system on the ZX Spectrum as one of my early programming adventures, with gimmicks such as 51x32 characters and text windows. Later on, I was in need of a programming language for a automotive test system (chances are that if you were ever driving a Ford or Renault made in Cologne during the late 1990s, the door mechanism was tested by it), and reused some ideas from Forth.
My most recent adventure into Forth-land is however the one closest to the original ideas and principles. The result is CoreForth , which is a Forth-implementation running on the ARM Cortex M3. Supported platforms are qemu and the LM3S811 board, and support for STM32 based boards such as the Olimex STM32P103 is coming along nicely. It is right now really not much more than a platform to easily experiment with such boards, but having the interactivity of Forth makes investigating and using the numerous on-chip peripherals of the Cortex chips very simple!
I also added a couple of links to other projects I have started on GitHub .