Re: substituting ROMs (Re: Illegal Clones)

[Matthew Montchalin <mmontcha@OregonVOS.net>]

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Matthew Russotto wrote:
|>The Apple II mini-assembler has a structure which, to my knowledge,
|>is unique in mocrocomputerdom.  It simply starts incrementing an
|>"opcode" byte in the destination location, _disassembling_ it after
|>each increment, until it matches what the user typed in!  It then
|>fills in the operand address byte(s), if any, and disassembles it
|>again to the screen.
|
|ROTFL.  I knew Woz was a genius, I didn't know he was a _twisted_
|genius.  Though the Disk II controller should have clued me in.

Why not just use a couple lookup tables?  (One for size of operand,
and one for addressing mode.)  Was RAM significantly more expensive,
as I would imagine, back when he did it the hard way?