Overview

RETRO is a small Forth, modeled after cmForth, colorForth, eForth, and Pygmy. It uses some, but not all of Chuck Moore's newer ideas. It's clean, elegant, and tiny. It doesn't have many features, and isn't particularly useful by itself, but it's easy to grasp and easily adapted to various uses.

RETRO runs on a lightweight virtual machine called Ngaro. This emulates a MISC-style instruction set, allowing RETRO to be written in a simple machine forth language. This machine forth is written in Toka.

RetroForth is released into the public domain. In short, this means that it can be used, modified, or redistributed without restrictions.

For support, try the new mailing list, or visit the #retro channel on irc.freenode.net.

Download

The source package below includes Ngaro and Toka, along with the scripts and tools used to build RETRO. The source package is normally updated weekly.

You can now try RETRO online. This is purely client side and emulates a minimal set of hardware for running RETRO. Graphics and other features are not yet supported by this. All core functionality works properly.

The current release of RETRO is 2008.05.10

Past releases of RetroForth can be found in the archive. Most of the old versions are located there, but a few have been lost through the years.

Documentation