Context sensitivity in beastie.4th?

[Scott Long]

Malcolm Kay wrote:
> I have installed FreeBSD 5.4 RELEASE on a new machine,
> Celeron + SATA drive, without and problems, include a kernel rebuild to
> support a PCI serial card.
> 
> But now I wish to change the graphic, beastie, that appears in the boot 
> menu. I am certainly no expert or even acolyte in forth programming but 
> the job appears to be simple enough -- just change the characters in the
> 'beastie' constructions and if we don't exceed the available screen space
> all should be well!
> 
> Well what I got was a cycling reboot going back ech time to the BIOS 
> splash screen and advancing an apparently negligable distance into the FBSD
> boot sequence.
> 
> I had actually copied /boot/beastie.4th to /boot/phoenix.4th, edited
> the copy and pointed /boot/loader.rc at phoenix.4th instead of beastie.4th.
> Recovery by booting from the distribution CD and entering "Fixit" to change
> the pointer back to beastie.4th.
> 
> Most variants on my original attempt ended up the same way, but some 
> crashed with a "directory full" message which seems quite strange as my 
> images have always been smaller than the original 'beastie'.
> 
> Replacing the colourised version of my 'phoenix' with a copy of the 
> monochrome version worked.
> 
> At present I have a phoenix.4th file which works but does not exhibit the 
> full image. The differences to the original beastie.4th file are shown here
> with escape characters replaced by '{esc}' to limit mail confusion.
> 
> With the line:
> ( 2dup at-xy ."         {esc}[1m^ ^" 1+ )
> uncommented the system goes back to an infinite boot loop.
> 
> This all seems very strange and unbelievable -- I must surely be doing 
> something very stupid. Does anyone have any idea what that might be?

Seems to work for me with the commented lines fixed.  Btw, you by no 
doubt have noticed that it's somewhat inconvenient to do 4th programming
by modifying the boot scripts and then praying that the reboot works.
It's possible to do 90% of the testing in userland, like I did when I
wrote beastie.4th.

Go to /sys/boot/ficl.  Do 'make clean && make testmain'.  This will 
create a binary called 'testmain' either in the '.' directory or in
/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/boot/ficl.  Copy this binary to your home
directory.  Then copy screen.4th, frames.4th, and beastie.4th from
/boot to your home directory.  Next create a file called init.4th
containing the following:

: boot drop exit ;
: reboot drop exit ;

load screen.4th
load frames.4th
load beastie.4th
beastie-start

Then run it via './testmain init.4th'.  The countdown timer won't
work and most of the keys naturally won't do what they are supposed to
do, but everything else in the menu should work just as it would at
boot.  I tested your colorized phoenix this way just now and it worked.

Scott