Nils -- Yes I agree. Also, I've been planning for a while to port to an ARM processor a Forth-like virtual machine I've developed that is based on one of the later hardware-implemented Forth designs that Charles Moore did as he moved away from the Forth mainstream development community. This VM is based on a 32-opcode Minimal Instruction Set. So far I've implemented it only in an x86 environment working directly at the x86 processor level with a bit of help from Windows for services such as file, threading, messaging and memory management. But the register-constrained Intel enviornment has been such a royal pain in the ass and I have been salivating at a more register-rich environment like the ARM processors with more general purpose registers and multiple hardware stacks, etc. I would love to implement the instruction primitives closer to the machine than I've been able to in the Intel environment, which presumably would make working more exclusively in VM byte code feasible and reduce the need to drop down to assembler. I might like to try my hand at implementing this on top of the Cortex M3 with help from whatever OS is provided in the MIDIBox platform (which I guess would be MIOS32 and FreeRTOS?). Pursuant to that, a quick question about MIDIBox: My current VM has built on top of it a bunch of facilities, including a Forth interpreter and compiler, an Intel assembler (I would have to make this a Thumb assembler) and classes, interfaces, parameterized types, etc. This becomes particularly powerful if one can develop interactively directly on the deployment platform, as with a full-fledged OS like Windows, because of the combined interpreted/compiled enviornment. To reproduce this benefit inside the MIDIBox, one would need to connect a keyboard and video monitor. Is anybody already doing this for any other purpose and has there been any success? Or are the resource constraints too prohibitive? Or is this perhaps too exotic an idea that doesn't arise in current scenarios? Also, I'm wondering how much of the 512K Flash memory and 64K RAM do the exisitng OS facilities occupy? Any insights as to the suitability of MIDIBox for such a project would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mike