When people on IRC have questions about Forth or I can't remember how a particular word works, it's nice to have a Forth handy to try things out on. For this, I usually open Tali Forth 2 in a browser window on my website. Even though it's a 6502 Forth running in a JavaScript 6502 emulator rather than a native x86 Forth like Gforth, it works just fine for experimenting. Since most of my programming is on Linux now, it seemed like a good idea to have a way to do my tests in a terminal.
There were several choices for getting Tali Forth 2 running on Linux. One of the easiest ways is to use an existing emulator like Py65 since Tali Forth 2 comes with a pre-compiled binary ready to be emulated. However, this was less interesting than using one of my own emulators. Another option was the JavaScript 6502 emulator running on my website. As mentioned in the post about my 6507 calculator, this also runs in a terminal thanks to node.js. Another option was to extract the emulation engine from my 6502 Interactive Assembler, although it seemed this would be time consuming to untangle since the emulator was not designed to work without the assembler. In the end, it was the most convenient to use the 6502 emulator written in MIPS assembly I've been working on for another project using the tools mentioned in my post about MIPS development in Linux. As mentioned in that post, a binary compiled for MIPS will run right from the Ubuntu command line as if it were native thanks to QEMU and also have access to the terminal through Linux syscalls. Going with this emulator was also an opportunity to double check my MIPS code emulates the 6502 correctly.
