How to get colorforth running under bochs

Install and patch bochs

Get the source for bochs 2.1.1: http://bochs.sourceforge.net/getcurrent.html

Note: bochs-2.1.1 seems to work (as described below) and bochs-2.2.1 does not.

Download patch.floppy-athiel from bochs cvs: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/bochs/bochs/patches/

Untar the sources and cd into the main source directory. Apply the patch with this command:

$ patch -p0 < ../patch.floppy-athiel

Now when you build bochs, be sure to pass --enable-vbe to ./configure

Build colorforth

You will need a special version of colorforth (vesa-chuck-8bit) that works with bochs. (This version does 8 bit graphics.) You can download it from http://personalwebs.oakland.edu/~maslicke/colorforth/

(The above page seems to be down, but it looks like Tim Neitz has a copy available at http://www.dnd.utwente.nl/~tim/colorforth/bochs/)

Unfortunately you need an x86 assembler to build colorforth.

$ make fd.img

this gives you the file fd.img. Now we just need to tell bochs that this file is a floppy in drive A: and that it should boot from it.

Configuring bochs

In the directory you're going to run bochs in, have your fd.img file and a file named .bochsrc with the following settings:

romimage: file=/usr/share/bochs/BIOS-bochs-latest, address=0xf0000
vgaromimage: /usr/share/bochs/VGABIOS-lgpl-latest
megs: 32
floppya: 1_44=fd.img, status=inserted
boot: floppy
ips: 1000000

Note: you may have to fix the paths to the BIOS-bochs-latest and VGABIOS-lgpl-latest above.

Run it!

$ bochs

tell it to run. this should be the default option; you should be able to just press enter. If you compiled bochs with debugger support, it will pop into the debugger, just go back to the terminal you ran bochs in and type continue and press enter.

colorforth should apear in a seccond or 10 in the bochs window.

It will run painfully slow.