Faraday cages ( was Re: staticy plastic tubs )

Sridhar Ayengar wrote: I don't have 4.5 but I do have 4.0 so that's what I used and it was substantially faster compiled, particularly in the graphics routines. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to use a game as a benchmark, so I did my own test anyway: I took QB 4.0 on my 5160 and altered SORTDEMO.BAS to force a uniform reverse-sorted list and remove all arbitrary delays, and then ran the Exchange Sort demo (has the least amount of screen drawing; see later). Here are the times in seconds: QB 4.0, interpreted (not really, it's p-code): 7.141 QB 4.0 compiled, runtime linked in: 6.320 MS-DOS Qbasic 1.1: 9.551 MSDOS Qbasic 1.1 may have had an unfair disadvantage because it had slower screen draw routines than the others, but all of the sorts that didn't rely on random variables (insertion, bubble, exchange, shell) across the board showed that the compiled version was faster by a small margin. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/