23 Feb
2014
23 Feb
'14
5:59 a.m.
And it met with commensurate success. In other words, the C-64 (perhaps
even the VIC) trounced it to pieces..
Back in those days, there were essentially two camps of home compy users:
The C-64 / Apple or perhaps Atari folks (most of us) who had an interest in
computing for the sake and pure thrill of it - and the 'serious' users with
CP/M machines such as Osborne, Kaypro, Epson, TRS-80 or even the dread
IBM-PC / XT with its crazy MS-DOS deal.
Seriously. The enthusiast camp was quite different from the "serious" camp.
The two rarely crossed paths, at least in those days.
On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 7:34 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 23 February 2014 13:22, Geoff Oltmans <oltmansg
at gmail.com> wrote:
On Feb 23, 2014, at 6:37 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
16-bit CPU
but the designers of the system hobbled it with an 8-bit data
bus. On top of this as you say the only internal register it had was the
workspace pointer register (and I think maybe the PC? not sure about that),
and then all the working registers were in system RAM...of which it had a
ridiculously small amount of... like < 512 bytes or so IIRC. All program
information was pulled off of GROMs (a special type of serial ROM in
cartridge) and any user programs on unexpanded systems was stored in video
RAM.
Urgh. What a kludgey design!
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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But yes, as you say, the first 16-bit home micro
- but very slow, in
fact slower than most 8-bits of its time period. AIUI part of the
reason for this is that the 99/4a CPU has no registers of its own,
uniquely among microprocessors - the registers are kept in main RAM,
meaning very slow bus accesses for /everything./
That's part of the problem, yes, but not the only factor. It was a