[Coco] Assembler Source file for the CoCo ROMs

William Astle lost at l-w.ca
Sun Oct 24 19:29:37 EDT 2010


On 10-10-24 02:24 PM, tim lindner wrote:
> 1. Compact BASIC. Try to squeeze it even tighter that it already is.
> Shove it as high in memory as you can and set the program RAM size
> higher that $7000.

I think you mean $8000.

In any event, I'd wager there is probably a few K that can be gained by 
doing that simply by eliminating the redundant stuff in command 
interpretation, tokenization, and the various overhead from ramhooks. 
That would give a non-trivial speedup, too.

> 2. Integer BASIC. Strip all of the floating point routines and replace
> them with integer versions. Result: BASIC program will have a smaller
> RAM footprint and will execute faster.

That would probably make a siginficant difference in the footprint but 
not so much in the floating point handling routines. The real difference 
would come from the removal of all the trig and similar functions that 
require floating point. It would, of course, make things run 
significantly faster, however.

> How about some more ideas (and maybe some code)!

A complete HPRINT character set (matching the hires text screen) could 
be done. (Don't even need to create the extra characters - they're 
present in the Coco3 ROM at the end of SECB).

Maybe also support for both floating point and integer variables, or 
even double precision floating point.


-- 
William Astle
lost at l-w.ca



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