Advice on Jupiter Ace development environment

General Chit Chat about Sinclair Computers and their Clones
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georgeo
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Feb 23, 2020 6:57 pm

Advice on Jupiter Ace development environment

Post by georgeo »

Hi everyone,

First of all, I realise this is a Sinclair forum and I am asking about a Jupiter Ace. However, I've not been able to find a dedicated Ace discussion group, plus I see there are some Ace-related discussions on this forum.

I've been getting to grips with AceFORTH recently, using the EightyOne emulator. I'm working on a port of the ZX Spectrum / ZX81 game Tut-tut, using Ace Forth (see current progress at https://youtu.be/ABJ2iE-gj4Q), given the Ace is short on good games plus I'm intrigued by Forth.

However, I have a couple of problems. First, I haven't worked out a way to import/ export Forth programs, so I am doing all my development on the Ace (emulator). On a couple of occasions, I have clearly forgotten to REDEFINE a word after editing it, so I have outdated versions of several words buried deep in the dictionary. Secondly, I've got to a point where the environment is unstable. When I try to edit a word, the Ace may freeze or lose the dictionary, for example. I wondered if I was short of memory as, on tape, my program occupies around 11.5kb. I tried switching to a 32kb RAM pack, though this hasn't helped.

Does anyone have any advice on how to remove orphaned words from deep in the dictionary -- perhaps there's a machine code routine to do this -- and does anyone have any thoughts about why my Ace emulator is unstable with the current version of the program loaded?

Thanks in advance,
Georgeo.
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