Oddest mismatch in hardware for a given purpose...

10 Jun 2009

...
    (The BASIC implementation is also incredibly buggy,
mostly due to  
 poor argument checking... see http://www.pisi.com.pl/piotr433/ 
 mk85mc1e.htm for a cool example of exploiting a bug in INPUT to do  
 machine-language coding, in a way only a contortionist could love...) 
 Gah, one of the home micro BASICs did something similar, so you  
 could throw MC in there as a character string and 'trick' the BASIC  
 into executing it by tripping the parser up - but my brain's  
 refusing to tell me which one it was now.  
    This is a pretty common trick on the ZX81/TS-1000.  You'd embed  
 machine code into a REM statement at the top of a program, as a  
 string of characters.  It was a real bitch to enter that stuff from  
 magazines. :-) 
Right, you could do this on a C64 also and probably many machines, but this
was just a convenient means of storage -- execution of arbitrary ML was
still permitted by the interpreter.  The MK-85 hack is noteworthy because it
allows you to run stuff on the CPU even though the BASIC supposedly doesn't
let you (no CALL, SYS, USR(), etc).

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- The son becomes the father, the father becomes the son, the uncle has a beer.

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Oddest mismatch in hardware for a given purpose...