17 Nov
2000
17 Nov
'00
5:55 p.m.
Cameron Kaiser skrev:
> The Commodore 64 had the worlds worst rom
operating system ever created.
> Most publishers just mapped it out and went straight to hardware to get
> good results.
Commodore's *BASIC* was poor in the 64, yes. It was
reasonably fast but
allowed no access to the machine's graphics and sound without resorting to
PEEKs and POKEs and SYStem calls. In that sense, the ROM was crummy.
Commodore's BASIC? It's Microsoft's BASIC, right?
OTOH, the BASIC 7 of the C128 was excellent. The C128 ROM makes any cartridge
superfluous.
However, the Commodore Kernal (note spelling; Kernal is
actually an acronym)
What does it mean? =)
Ahem. Disks are not emulated by tape in the 64. In the
64, Commodore had
buggy hardware and decided to cripple the serial bus to compensate, hence the
speed. Many, many companies designed fast loader applications; my favourite,
the Epyx FastLoad, uses some of the other serial port pins to do parallel
transfers. Tape is terribly slow also, but then again highly reliable since
programs are actually written twice, and then checksummed on top of that.
Barring freaky loaders of which there are many, ?LOAD ERRORs are unheard of
on the 64 and VIC-20 (unless you run the tape over with a truck or a faulty
bulk eraser -- and maybe not even then :-).
Load errors? No, not those, the machine simply goes on loading and loading, or
fails without an explanation.
As a followup, Commodore fixed the serial bus in the
C128. In 128 mode with
a fast-serial peripheral like a 1571 or 1581, serial bus transfers fly.
And they say USB is an original idea. ;-)
From glancing at Commodore Hacking (online 'zine),
it seems the problem was
actually addressed back on the C64, but not software
supported, or being
disabled through lack of some simple components. The problem lies with the
VIC20.
GEOS had its own *fast loader* but still used most of
the 1541 DOS routines
for things like scratches and renames.
But the file system is incompatible, right?
--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6.
optimus@dec:foo$ %blow
bash: fg: %blow: no such job