Getting Started
You can always get the latest version of RetroForth from http://retro.tunes.org. At the time of this writing, the latest version is 8.0.
There are different downloads for each port. The Windows version is distributed as a zip file, while the others are in .tar.gz format. Binaries are in retroforth/bin. Most ports have a single file named "rf" here. A few ports require you to build the binary yourself. Instructions follow in a later section of this manual.
Users of the L4 or native versions will have a different scenario: bin/diskimage is a raw floppy image that needs to be written to a floppy disk using something like:
dd if=diskimage of=/dev/fd0
This floppy can then be booted. You can also do 'make vmware' if you have 'dd' and 'make'; this will create a 1.44MB disk image that can be used with VMWare.
Rebuilding is simply a matter of ensuring that you have FASM and MAKE in your path, and running 'make' at a command line. BeOS and generic users will also need GCC and BINUTILS installed. The resulting binary will replace the one in retroforth/bin. Windows users can also run 'build.bat' if they don't have 'make' installed. If you need to rebuild, you can get FASM from http://flatassembler.net
Unless you're using BeOS or a generic port, you don't need to bother rebuilding unless you make changes to the source tree. Your binary won't be any better matched for your OS since we don't use any libraries, except in the BeOS and generic versions.
Source Tree
There are many files in the source tree, but it's pretty easy to find what you need due to careful organization:
core.asm Port-independent code
core.dict Port-independent dictionary declarations
macros.fasm Macros used in the Forth Core
rf.asm Port-specific code
raw.asm For RetroForth/Native only.
blocks/base The core wordset for RetroForth.
blocks/blockio RetroForth 8-style block I/O.
blocks/classic-ui Classic Forth "OK"-style prompt.
blocks/colors Colors for use with output.
blocks/portio For Native and L4 only.
blocks/red* The block editor.
You might see a core.f file in your distribution. This is auto-generated by the build process, given the contents of the blocks/ directory as input.