Re: 6502 illegal opcodes questions

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <e4s9lm$r0g$1@rzsun03.rrz.uni-hamburg.de>,
John Selck  <selck_j@informatik.hgv-hamburg.de> wrote:
>Stephen Harris wrote:
>
>> And now you've introduced program bloat, dual code paths, extra potential for
>> bugs...
>
>That's the way you handle low level stuff. All your Windows XP drivers 
>are doing the same, and all the games which support SSE or MMX instructions.

You can do that today, with GigaBytes of RAM available.  But doing it on
an Apple II, with 48k (or less) RAM is a waste of memory resources.


>Doing it the "one routine works for every condition" way usually means 
>10 times slower programs.

...of course "10 times slower" doesn't matter much with today's fast
processors.  That's why Java has succeeded while UCSD Pascal failed,
even though they both built upon the same concept: portable binary code
which was to be interpreted on the target hardware.


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