ice-forth: A self-hosted Forth on the 6502 for creating NES cartridges

Ice Forth

A Forth implementation self-hosted on the 6502, for creating NES cartridges.

Compiling a cartridge has several stages.

1. The assembly code (.s files) are compiled into an initial cartridge bootstrap.bin . This is a 64kb file containing the full memory space at startup for the next step. In that space we have the the basics of a Forth interpreter with an integrated assembler. (This only takes up a few kb of the full 64).

2. 6502.lua loads bootstrap.bin into its memory, and emulates running the interpreter on the NES processor, using a virtual cartridge with RAM everywhere. The emulator has the crucial addition of an IO port, which is used to input Forth code and get Forth output.

3. A minimal subset of the Forth environment is defined in assembly, so next we stream in the contents of bootstrap.f to the running cartridge. This defines the rest of the base Forth environment.

4. Other Forth code is defined in other files which are streamed in, and afterward the REPL opens for the user to test words. This Forth code is compiled into what will become cartridge space on the NES, and defines the NES program. The emulation finishes at the execution of the word freeze .

5. freeze will turn the running interpreter into a ROM. The contents of NES RAM in the intepreter are compressed and moved into the cartridge space so they can be restored after freeze finishes, but the Forth data, return, and control flow stacks are emptied. The Forth internal temp locations are also emptied. Once the compressed data is written, the memory space from $8000-$FFFF is now permanently frozen. This section of memory becomes the PRG data of the out.nes file.

6. The NES ROM is now created. The word thaw is the startup word. It will restore the state of the machine and return as if returning from the word freeze.

Features

• Not really compliant with ANS Forth :/
• Subroutine-threaded compilation
• Includes assembler and disassembler for NMOS 6502, written in 6502 assembly.
• Alpha state -- very buggy

Running

Edit Makefile with the path to your ca65 and ld65 executables. Ensure you have luajit installed.

$ make run

Try some commands:

Welcome to Forth!
\ Math examples
1 2 + .

hex FF . decimal

Welcome to Forth!
\ Disassembler example
' val >impl disas

Welcome to Forth!
\ Defining new words
: six 1 2 3 + + ;

Welcome to Forth!
\ Assembler usage
: oam-dma [
  hex
  sprites >byte LDA.#
  4014          STA
  decimal
] ;

Once you are ready to try the NES cartridge, use the word done .

Implementation details

Dictionary format

A dictionary entry looks like this:

DUP:
jmp DUP_IMPL
.byte reserved
.byte name-length | Flags
.byte "DUP"

There is no previous pointer since the next entry comes right after the name.

There are 5 + name-length bytes in each entry. The dictionary grows downwards from the end of the address space, while the actual code of the code starts near the start of the address space and grows up. This separation is so that code can theoretically be relocated. Eventually, words will be optimized by bringing them to the front of the code area, shifting everything back, and then modifying their code. The only thing that needs to change when a word is relocated is to update the target of the jmp instruction. (Assuming the word itself is written with relocatable code).

Since the same address is the entry point for the code and the start of the dictionary entry, execution tokens and dictionary entry pointers are the same.

Subroutine threaded code

The code is compiled to subrouting-threaded code with many inlined functions. Try ' val >impl disas to the see the disassembly for the val word.

Assembler/Disassembler

The bootstrap assembly includes a 6502 assembler and disassembler. Having all 130+ instructions in the dictionary would be too much, so information about each instruction is stored in a more compact form. The main data table stores only 4 nibbles (2 bytes) for each instruction. These 4 values give the indices of the 3 opcode letters, and the addressing mode. For example, from disassembler.s :

FirstLetter:  .byte "ABCDEIJLNOPRST"

Each instruction has a value from 0-13 indicating the index of the first letter of the opcode in this list of letters. There are similar lists for the second and third letters of each opcode. A slight complication arises for the second letters. Among all of the opcodes, there are 18 different letters used. The easiest way to work around this was to have special cases for txa , tya , and txs , which are the only instructions which use x or y as the second letter, and have only an implied addressing mode. This brings the list of second letters down to 16.

To save a bit more space, we make use of the fact that there are no legal 6502 instructions which end in the binary sequence %11 . These are excluded from the table of instructions, giving 25% savings.

The syntax of the assembler is based on the Typist's Assembler Notation . To indicate the addressing mode of an instruction, a tail like .ZX is added, here indicating the ZeroPage,X addressing mode.

When a dictionary lookup fails, the Forth interpreter will try to parse the word as an instruction. If it succeeds, then it will either execute or compile the instruction word. An instruction word has these semantics:

1. At runtime, appends the instruction and its arguments to the code area at chere . For example, a Forth definition for LDA would look like this:

( addr -- )
: LDA  [ hex ] AD c, , ;

1. At compile time, compiles a call to [asm] ( RUN_ASM ), with inline parameters indicating the opcode and number of argument bytes for the instruction. [asm] will handle the runtime semantics of the instruction.

The 6502 emulator

A simple emulator written in C++ is included. It is a very basic emulator, probably has bugs even in basic operations, and not all instructions are supported. (e.g. BRK and interrupts are unsupported). Like the NES, it doesn't include the

To assist in debugging, these extra instructions are added:

$FF
$EF
$DF

An IO port at $401C powers the REPL. The emulator reads from stdin line-by-line, and reads on $401C return the next byte from the input, blocking if there are none. Writes are immediately sent to stdout.

The emulator exits cleanly when executing jmp 0 . On exit, the emulator writes out several files:

• out.nes - The resulting NES file. This is the contents of memory at $8000-$FFFF on exit. The 16 byte iNES header is added.
• ram.out - The contents of RAM from $00-$7FF on exit, for debugging purposes
• ops.out - A log of the memory writes and IO input that the emulator has processed since startup. Using visualize-ops.html , you can see an animation of the Forth compiler working. It shows a 256x256 grid representing each byte as a single square, as well as each character that is read from the IO port.