19 Mar
2012
19 Mar
'12
7:40 a.m.
On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 4:03 AM, Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com> wrote:
dwight elvey wrote:
Yep.
I got my start on a 1MHz 6502. The BASIC game engine for Scott Adams'
first two adventures ("Adventureland" and "Pirate's Adventure")
took
several seconds to loop through the 151-entry-long action table, so
even if you knew what to do, the game took hours. The first real 6502
machine language program I wrote was a Scott Adams' engine. That flew
through the game almost as fast as you could type.
The Apple II in text mode isn't any faster than what I started with
(32K PET), and I don't know of any serious work involving hi-res
graphics and BASIC. That was all done with 6502 assembly.
BASIC on an 8-bit micro is just slow.
-ethan
?The one thing I found is that the BASIC on the Apple is really
slow. It is about the slowest I've ever used. How people put
up with it I don't know.
We put up with it back in the late 1970s because none of the common,
inexpensive microcomputers available at the time were any faster. ?And
although the Atari 800 had better graphics, it had far worse I/O.
Even the 4 MHz Z80 systems and 5 MHz 8088 systems weren't much faster,
because the 6502 is more cycle-efficient than either.