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Tutorials

Forth is daunting to the newcomer. These tutorials are presented in the hopes of easing the transition into Forth. If you have never touched Forth before then please start with the What Is Forth? primer. Also, please note that a complete, online language reference is available which documents every word in the TurboForth dictionary.

Finally, if you can't figure something out, please don't hesitate to post your question on the TI-99/4A Development Forum over at Atariage (a really friendly, knowledgeable crowd), or on comp.lang.forth.

Book

A companion book to TurboForth is currently under development. The book starts from the very first principles of Forth, and takes you through into using TurboForth specifically on the TI-99/4A.

Tutorial Subjects

• 1 The Stack
  • 1.1 What is the stack
  • 1.2 Putting numbers on the stack
  • 1.3 Taking numbers off the stack
  • 1.4 Moving numbers around on the stack
  • 1.5 A Brief Sojourn Into Stack Comments and Why They Are So Damn Important
• 2 Colon Definitions
  • 2.1 What are colon definitions?
• 3 Decision Making
  • 3.1 IF...ELSE...THEN
  • 3.2 CASE
• 4 Looping
  • 4.1 BEGIN...AGAIN
  • 4.2 DO...LOOP
  • 4.3 I
  • 4.4 J
  • 4.5 DO...+LOOP
  • 4.6 FOR...NEXT
  • 4.7 BEGIN...WHILE...REPEAT
  • 4.8 LEAVE
• 5 Variables
  • 5.1 Declaring variables with VARIABLE
  • 5.2 Writing values to variables
  • 5.3 Reading values from variables
• 6 Values
  • 6.1 Declaring values with VALUE
  • 6.2 Writing to values
  • 6.3 Reading from values
• 7 Constants
  • 7.1 Declaring constants with CONSTANT
  • 7.2 Using Constants
• 8 Console Functions
  • 8.1 Displaying characters
  • 8.2 Displaying strings
    • 8.2.1 With ."
    • 8.2.2 With S" and TYPE
  • 8.3 Moving the cursor
    • 8.3.1 With CR
    • 8.3.2 With GOTOXY
  • 8.4 Reading the keyboard
    • 8.4.1 With KEY
    • 8.4.2 With KEY?
  • 8.5 Reading joysticks
  • 8.6 Supressing screen scrolling
• 9 Graphics Functions
  • 9.1 HCHAR and VCHAR
  • 9.2 Defining characters with DCHAR
    • 9.2.1 32 Column Mode
    • 9.2.2 Redefining a Character
    • 9.2.3 Defining a Character Using Data
    • 9.2.4 Alternative method to defining a character
  • 9.3 Setting colours with COLOR
  • 9.4 Setting the screen colour with SCREEN
  • 9.5 Sprites
  • 9.5.1 Setting the Size of Sprites with MAGNIFY
  • 9.5.2 Defining Sprites with DHCAR
  • 9.5.3 Initialising sprites with SPRITE
  • 9.5.4 Changing a sprite's position with SPRLOC
  • 9.5.5 Determining a Sprites' Location with SPRLOC?
  • 9.5.6 Changing a sprite's definition with SPRPAT
  • 9.5.7 Changing a sprite's colour with SPRCOL
  • 9.5.8 Setting up movement vectors with SPRVEC
  • 9.5.9 Moving sprites with SPRMOV
• 10 Sound
• 10.1 Supplementary Sound Words
• 10.1.1 Example Usage
• 10.2 Code Equivalents of the Supplementary Sound Words
• 10.3 Frequency Constants
• 11 Speech
• 11.1 Types of Speech
• 11.2 Speaking from the speech synthesizer vocabulary with SAY
• 11.3 Speaking from raw LPC data with STREAM
• 11.4 Background Speech
• 11.5 Determining Speech Synthesizer Status
• 11.6 Determining if Speech is Supported
• 12 Block IO
  • 12.1 What are blocks?
  • 12.2 The Block Buffer System
  • 12.3 Creating Blocks Files For Your Own Use
    • 12.3.1 Auto Booting
    • 12.3.2 Overriding Auto Boot Behaviour
  • 12.4 Editing Blocks and Code with the Built-in Editor
  • 12.5 Using Blocks to Store Data
  • 12.6 Saving Pre-compiled Code into Blocks with BSAVE (To do)
  • 12.7 Block Related Words
• 13 File I/O
  • 13.1 Basic Concepts
  • 13.2 Defining File Buffers
  • 13.3 Define File Characteristics
    • 13.3.1 File name
    • 13.3.2 Display or Internal File Type?
    • 13.3.3 Record Length: Variable or Fixed
    • 13.3.4 Record length
      • 13.3.4.1 With Variable Record Length Type Files
      • 13.3.4.2 With Fixed Record Length Type Files
  • 13.4 Input, Output, Update or Append Modes
    • 13.4.1 Input Mode
    • 13.4.2 Output Mode
    • 13.4.3 Append Mode
    • 13.4.4 Update Mode
  • 13.5 Sequential or Relative Record Access
    • 13.5.1 Sequential Access
    • 13.5.2 Relative Access
  • 13.6 Working With Files
• 13.7 Opening the File - #OPEN ( -- flag )
• 13.8 Writing to Files - #PUT ( addr len file_id -- flag )
  • 13.8.1 Example of #PUT
• 13.9 Reading From Files - #GET ( addr file_id -- flag )
  • 13.9.1 Example of #GET
• 13.10 Detecting the End of a File - #EOF? ( file_id -- flag )
  • 13.10.1 Example of #EOF?
• 13.11 Closing the File - #CLOSE ( file-id -- )
• 13.12 More Advanced File Operations
  • 13.12.1 Append Mode
  • 13.12.2 Update Mode
  • 13.12.3 Relative Files - #REC
    • 13.12.3.1 Creating
    • 13.12.3.2 Reading
• 13.13 Example Programs
  • 13.13.1 Export a Block to a Text File
  • 13.13.2 Import a Text File to a Block
• 13.14 File Attributes Summary
  

Note: Some of the subjects discussed above are demonstrated in the game Dark Star.

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