mdj wrote:
Yes, I regularly assemble a few thousand lines with Merlin 8 Pro, and with the screen listing turned off, it does it in seconds, not minutes (with an 8MHz Zip Chip). That's fast enough that I don't get out of my chair. ;-)
Interesting that you choose not to do development on a PC (under an emulator)...
A few years back I did some development on the TRS-80 which involved a relatively small amount of Z80 assembler (in the vicinity of a few hundred lines). I was using an emulator mainly so I could edit the source using my favourite PC text editor, 1280x1024 LCD display, etc etc, and then task-switch to the emulator and run a native TRS-80 DOS batch file which re-imported the text file into the virtual disk image and then ran the assembler.
Originally I had the emulation running at 'natural speed' (disk drives and CPU) and I was incredulous at how long it took to assemble my code - MINUTES!!! The software was split across 2 virtual floppy drives and from what I could tell, quite I/O bound. I just don't seem to recall it ever taking that long - I guess I've become more impatient as computers have gotten faster!?!
By un-throttling the emulator it reduced the time to build to a handful of seconds! Ultimately I could edit the assembler source and have it actually *running* less than 10 seconds after hitting <F2> in my editor.
A far cry from the days when I was attempting a pixel_perfect port of Lode Runner to the TRS-80! ;)
Regards, -- Mark McDougall, Engineer Virtual Logic Pty Ltd, <http://www.vl.com.au> 21-25 King St, Rockdale, 2216 Ph: +612-9599-3255 Fax: +612-9599-3266