30 Jun
2014
30 Jun
'14
1:11 p.m.
There was absolutely no way to actually get into the
innards of the
machine as the BASIC had no peek or poke commands... and CERTAINLY no
way to write even basic assembler routines... the only way I'm aware
of to write anything that would run at a reasonable speed was to get
the massive expansion box, and some disk drives.
As has been mentioned here before, the main problem with this machine was
the memory arrangement. There was very little memeory (256 bytes or
soemthing) actually on the processor bus. There was 16K of memeory on the
video chip. BASIC programs were stored in unused parts of the video
memory, which the processor could read out via the video chip and then
interpret said programs.
This eman htat (a) the machien was ridiculously slow and (b) there was
nowhere to store amchine code programs (the vdieo memory was ony
accessible via the video chip, and thus the processor couldn't run
machine code stored there).
I am told tehre were RAM expansion boards that actually put some RAM on
the processor bus, but not in the basic machine
-tony