there is hope for tiny code!

Rumor has it that Richard may have mentioned these words: Drivewire for the Tandy CoCo1/2/3 (http://www.cloud9tech.com.) use hand-tuned assembly for the serial routines on the bit-banger (one bit of a PIA, toggled by software) port - they acheive 38400bps on a .89Mhz 6809 (CoCo1/2), and 57600 on a 1.78Mhz 6809 (CoCo3). I've booted NitrOS9 on my machine, and it's pretty durned quick. Not *quite* as fast as the floppy drive (and certainly not as fast as the CF memory card I have on the IDE bus ;-) but awfully handy! (Oh, and check out the SuperBoard project...) Think that's impressive? Think again! Head on over to http://www.coco3.org/ and check out Portal-9. The author (Roger Taylor) is reworking the IDE and calling it Rainbow - Roger has just gotten 57600 on the .89Mhz CoCo1/2, and 115200 on the CoCo3! The code is around 600 bytes, I'm working on a freeware/beerware (haven't decided yet - either way, the source will be released) library of routines for the CoCo3 which will help assembly coders do "kewl stuff" on a CoCo3 without needing the built-in ROM, setting up the video, reading the non-encoded keyboard, accessing the floppy drives, etc. I wouldn't consider my assembly coding "impressive," "phenomenal," or such, but it can't be that bad - it works! ;-) [[ That said, I certainly wouldn't do this for anything other than a hobby... At work, I primarily code in basic Bash scripting & Python when I actually wanna get work done... ;-) ]] Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Bugs of a feather flock together." sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Russell Nelson zmerch at 30below.com |