Re: Is it too hard to program for the Apple?

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

On Feb 22, 1:24 pm, Calibrator <calibra...@freenet.de> wrote:
> On 22 Feb., 03:56, BLuRry <brendan.rob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > So, when I am doing a build of something like, say, apple game server,
> > I select "clean/build" on the project in my IDE and in addition to
> > recompiling the java assets, all of the machine code is reassembled as
> > well and repackaged into the program executable.  So that way, the
> > next time I start the project, it's all ready to go.
>
> Thanks for taking the time! What IDE are you using?
>
Netbeans 6.8 -- shamelessly at that.  The tweaks for compiling were
done by modifying my project's Ant script.  I suppose you could use
Ant for building anything, really, but at some point shell scripts
might make a lot more sense.  Ant is what Netbeans uses so that's why
I did it that way.

> Keep us posted with the progress on the emulator!

Indeed!  Finishing up a few other side projects (one down, one to go)
and then I look forward to getting back to it.

> How fast would the read access on a physical Apple be?

Depends on how much you want to abuse the serial card.  If you
overclock the SSC using the undocumented clock setting, then it's
possible you could beat the speed of a floppy disk.  Probably not the
speed of a harddisk.  With no OS and no constant request/response of
individual sectors, single load games go quite fast.  When sending
individual sectors (from experience of supporting Dos 3.3 from Apple
Game Server) it does seem to go a little slower than the disk, but it
could also be the java side that takes too long to respond -- not sure
yet.  Since Prodos deals with larger blocks it might actually work
out.  Like floppy access, interrupts have to be disabled because
there's no buffering of input and only 50-or-so clock cycles to poll,
read and store each byte as it comes in.

Compression:
I could also add in-line packbits decompression, but I don't know
exactly if that would yield any advantages as of yet.  If compression
is useful, it could speed up transfers a bit.  I doubt that something
optimized for hi-res compression would be very efficient with binary
or basic programs though.

> I say "self-made" because I had to solder a special three-way
> serial floppy cable with an actual physical switch to choose
> which computer had access to the floppy (these drives were
> expensive back then and I was too lazy to swap disks anyway ;-)

That's just cool.  Scary, but cool.  After letting the magic smoke out
of a drive in my childhood, I would have never dared.  ;-)

> This worked surprisingly well but a year later I got an Amiga
> and never used it again...

If I had an Amiga as a child, I suppose I'd be nostalgic about '020s
and such.  That computer was the best Atari ever designed.  Too bad
Atari engineers designed it for someone else.  Oh well, there's always
Mods!

-Brendan