I am working on a port of the 32-bit FORTH interpreter OF816 for my X65-SBC computer with the 65C816 CPU. The OF816 was created by mgcaret and is available on github. I made a fork of the OF816 project and added a new branch for my work: x65-sbc.
The OF816 already supports a couple of 65C816-based systems: GoSXB, Apple IIgs, Neon816 and the W65C816SXB. I added a new subdirectory X65 in the platforms directory and initially copied from the Neon816 port, because it seemed the simplest.
The initial support for X65-SBC was not difficult to program. I modified the `_system_interface` routine in the `platform-lib.s` to work with the USB/UART registers that are implemented in NORA FPGA on the X65-SBC. After adjusting memory addresses in a linker script, I was surprised that this minimal OF816 port worked on the first try.
The screenshot above shows a terminal emulator on Linux PC connected over USB/UART to the X65-SBC computer running the OF816 FORTH interpreter. Since I am just a beginner in the FORTH language, it took me a few lines to enter and run a Hello World loop.
This OF816 FORTH port currently communicates over the UART on the X65-SBC. Therefore the user interface is on the host PC for now, and the keyboard and video output on X65-SBC are not utilized.
This is just temporary as I am already working on a basic virtual terminal (i.e. screen editor) for the X65-SBC and the first “client” will the OF816 interpreter.
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