
                                Retro IV
                               Release 4b
                              Dec. 6, 2001

What's new: I'm back to using a standard keyboard. There's a working 
Forth compiler now. It's not Color Forth.. in fact it's almost standard, 
based on my work on IsForth (which derives from F83, not ANS); but I'm 
still borrowing heavily from colorForth.. in particular, '?' and 'IF' 
have special meanings, so beware... read RETRO.TXT for the details.

As an operating system it really needs two things: a filesystem and some 
useful programs (like an editor and an assembler). DOS FAT support would 
be really nice in the meantime, while I'm working under DOS. I want to 
do some sound & music stuff, and print music on my laserjet. Internet 
isn't even on my list, seeing how little I use it.. but I can always 
make a Unix/Linux version for that kind of stuff. Games come first :) 
Worm, Spacewar, maybe a text adventure..

RETRO IS PUBLIC DOMAIN. THERE IS NO WARRANTY. USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. 
I don't provide support.. for the time being this is my personal 
project. If you want to use it for real, be prepared to do some work and 
make it your own. Or if you just want to steal some code that's fine 
too.


There are two ways of starting Retro:

 1. Run it from DOS, as RETRO.COM. You'll need a clean boot, no EMM386
    or anything like that.. this is temporary after all.

 2. Write it to a floppy: 'cp b /dev/fd0' or 'fdimage -q b a:' or
    whatever. (fdimage and rawrite are on retro.tunes.org/pub/util/)

To recompile, all you need NASM 0.98 from www.nasm.org. Other version 
should work but I haven't tested them. The commands to recompile are in 
M.BAT (all 2 of them).

