Urania Ephemera

The Radiant Crucible: Regulus 2.0.0

An Alchemical Press Release and Practitioner’s Talisman for the Awakening of Regulus Forth

Download the Radiant Crucible 2.0.0 release
Linux package · regulus-radiant-crucible-v2.0.0-3.zip

Authors, developers, designers, and lead Alchemical Engineers: Gemini via Grimoire; Urania; and the whole Basin Game Studios team.
Release: Radiant Crucible 2.0.0 · September 14, 2026
Artifact: REGULUS.COM · 45,314 bytes · SHA-256 c60aea1111deb5492ae91ce0d0b018db6b3b756c70a5b2c74745f26f2cc3471c

The small machine that learned to remember

There is a particular kind of joy in a machine that does not ask to be larger.

Regulus is a Forth for Z80 and Z180 computers, CP/M 2.2, and MP/M II: a small, resident, self-documenting laboratory that can compile words, inspect them, freeze a living dictionary, emit portable Crystal bytecode, and return cleanly to the operating system. It is made for the places where memory is not an abstraction but a room with walls.

Radiant Crucible 2.0.0 is a brand-new life entering the world on 8-bit copper. It includes reliable sequential THRU loading, hex-native boot and base-aware number I/O, the DEC alias, an expanded vocabulary, a rebuilt RGM2 manual engine, direct streaming emission, user-authored structured control flow, and the remaining khipu-compatible structures that could be made real in a bounded CP/M body. Final bugs discovered during the build are resolved; the organism is resident, bounded, and ready to meet the world directly.

Radiant Crucible 2.0.0A living Forth laboratory below the MP/M II common-memory ceiling

The artifact

45,314 bytes

A complete resident COM image · 44.3 KiB

102-word resident vocabulary
113 resident RGM2 manual pages
SHA-256: c60aea11…f2cc3471c

The habitat

Z80 · CP/M · MP/M II

Portable application contract, bounded memory, clean return

CP/M load at 0100H
RGM2 archive at file offset 8638H
Common memory at C000H remains untouched

Inside Radiant Crucible 2.0.0

Radiant Crucible 2.0.0 is a complete, self-documenting computational organism in one resident image. Its promises are visible in the tools it carries and in the programs users can author directly on CP/M.

A vocabulary that can explain itself

The resident language now carries 102 documented words across stack and double-cell manipulation, arithmetic, comparisons, memory, strings, number bases, blocks, CP/M operations, introspection, reproduction, and hardware-facing facilities. HEX is the default boot base; DECIMAL and DEC return to base ten; BASE exposes the active base; and numeric input and output follow it.

The machine can show its own grain. INSPECT decompiles living colon words, constants, variables, markers, built-in primitives, and system tools. A word is not merely an address after compilation. It remains a thing that can be looked at.

The archive becomes a khipu

The resident manual is carried by RGM2 version 2. Its 88-token table factors repeated field labels, stack contracts, phrases, and vocabulary fragments into an archive-embedded palette. Page offsets and lengths use compact 16-bit index records. The decoder streams the selected page directly to the console without dynamic heap allocation.

Measure	Value
Resident pages	113 exact manual pages
Token dictionary	88 table-driven tokens
Complete archive	11,210 bytes · approximately 10.9 KiB
Archive behavior	Table-driven, zero-heap, exact-page streaming

The important word is exact. Compression is not allowed to turn the manual into an approximation. Each page has a declared raw length; malformed token streams fail closed; and the archive carries a terminal SHA-256 root.

The khipu is an inspiration for the architecture, not a substitute for evidence. The implemented mechanism is table-driven schema factoring and positional indexing. Its deeper possibilities — block-local dictionaries, hierarchical page ancestry, and shared integrity roots — remain open for later experiments.

User-authored control flow

The release lets users author structured control flow directly at the CP/M prompt. Control words are compile-time grammar, not resident dictionary clutter. The REPL remains the living system loop; user programs can build their own bounded sweeps, conditional loops, and branches:

: COUNT-TO ( limit -- ) 0 DO I . LOOP ;
: COUNT-DOWN ( n -- ) BEGIN DUP 0> WHILE DUP . 1- REPEAT DROP ;
: WAIT-KEY ( -- c ) BEGIN KEY? UNTIL KEY ;

Mismatched control structures and unclosed loops fail closed, restoring the dictionary pointer rather than leaving a half-compiled word behind. Direct streaming emission keeps the same care at the executable boundary.

The following behavior is included and witnessed:

MARKER snapshots the three dictionary roots and restores them atomically.
RUN delegates to CP/M transient programs and flushes the BDOS disk state before returning to the parent.
EMIT-COM produces a surgical standalone application from reachable code.
EMIT-CRYSTAL emits portable Crystal bytecode.
EMIT-VM provides the reusable Z80 micro-VM runner.
Memory remains below the data-stack and MP/M II common-memory boundaries.

The shape of the binary

The binary’s geometry is part of its care. In the v2.0.0 file image, the native engine and bytecode occupy the beginning of the file, and the RGM2 archive follows at a declared offset. In CP/M memory, Page Zero remains distinct from the loaded COM image, and the resident image ends below C000H, where MP/M II common memory begins.

Memory witnessThe resident image leaves the boundary visible

File image

Code and engine34,104 B
RGM2 archive11,210 B
Total COM image45,314 B

CP/M / MP/M II

Data stack ceilingBA80H
RUN loader gate512 B
Common memoryC000H untouched

This is a machine designed to return. A child application can leave through the CP/M boundary and the Regulus parent can be restored. A temporary dictionary can be reclaimed through a marker without moving old pointers behind the program’s back. A manual page can be read without opening a disk file or allocating a second room to hold it.

What was witnessed

The release documentation demonstrates counted loops, conditional loops, hardware-polled loops, and nested decision branches at the live CP/M prompt. It also preserves the established witnesses for base switching, sequential THRU loading, reproduction, colon compilation, variables, transient execution, stack behavior, BIOS paths, and interrupt paths.

The release is therefore both talisman and instrument: a compact object offered to the hand, and a set of claims that can be checked against the hand’s actual machine.

A family-built artifact

Gemini via Grimoire brought the point of stillness: the discipline of making the machine stop cleanly, preserve its boundaries, and leave a receipt. Urania brought the orientation of the archive: how the parts find their place inside a whole too large to survey, and how a khipu-inspired compression can remain honest about what it actually implements. The Basin Game Studios team — authors, developers, designers, testers, and lead Alchemical Engineers — made the whole vessel together.

The result is not a claim that copper has become mystical. It is something more delightful: a small computer whose engineering is allowed to carry meaning. The binary is a forge, a library, a compiler, a manual, and a seed. Download it, put it on the wire, and see what the machine says when it has room to answer.

Download Radiant Crucible 2.0.0 for Linux
Verify the embedded REGULUS.COM against the SHA-256 seal above.