building a PDP11 from the things you find at home

--- Jerome Fine <jhfine(a)idirect.com> wrote: I agree with that. Even though I have a raft of PET hardware, it was several times faster to hack the Infocom ZIP program from the C-64 to the PET under VICE on my SPARC5 than to do it on the real thing. I used to develop software on the C-64 and Apple ][ back in the day when they were tops in the home. We had one C-64 for editing/printing, one for compiling and one for running. I rolled my chair up and down the aisle, sneakernet on wheels. I could get an edit/compile/test cycle down to a few minutes that way. For the ZIP port, I had emacs open to the source, a shell window for a cross-compiler, and a VICE window with a Zork-I disk image mounted as drive 8 and the local directory mounted as drive 9. The things I could have written in 1984 if I'd had that developement environment! The proof, of course, is that it works on the real thing. So far, I haven't gotten around to that because I have no working BASIC 3.0 PETs and the code I have doesn't work under BASIC 4.0 (zero page conflicts with the kernal) Someday, though, I'll dig out my oldest PET (the one I got new in grade school) and put the finishing touches on it. For some odd reason, all I've picked up in the way of PETs since then have been 8032s and maybe one fat-40. -ethan ===== Visit "The Seventh Continent" http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/