Alex Freed wrote:
vladitx wrote:I'd guess that screen scroll suffers from this.Maybe it does, but it doesn't have to. In fact I think it could be made to work much faster than with the shared memory. Suppose the whole "terminal emulator" is implemented on 6502 - maybe just the ROM routines are used. Then the z80 will only issue a (single byte?) command "scroll the screen" and continue whatever it was doing while the 6502 does the scrolling at the same time. It will finish and signal "ready" to z80 to process the next request.
Unfortunately, the stock Applicard OS is too dumb to do this asynchronously. I implemented something like that to speed up the CardZ180, though.
Another guess is that probably GBASIC doesn't work on Applicard?
I honestly don't know. I would sooner saw off my left arm than use BASIC for anything, so I'm the wrong person to answer that.
I think I read that some trick allows MS basic to work but no graphics.
I'm guessing that Microsoft used the same hack in all tools shipped with the Softcard to prevent them from working in other environments. I have seen patches for Microsoft Fortran and the ALDS cross-assembler to work around it (the latter is absolutely vital to setting up a native build environment, IMHO).