8-bit War (Was Processor balance)

From: Gene Buckle <geneb_at_deltasoft.com>
Date: Thu Nov 16 09:20:01 2000

> The Commodore 64 had the worlds worst rom operating system ever created.
Are you referring to the ROM that existed in the drive?

> better than the Apple. The C='s main fault was the i/o. The machine
> could read tape ok, but to read disks it had to emulate the tape drive and
Say WHAT?! I *strongly* disagree with you here. It never "emulated the
tape drive". Sure, it was slow as a dog, but that is due to the serial
nature of the drive interface. I don't even think the tape and serial
device bus shared the same CIA chip.

To get high speed, high capacity drives for the C-64, you just added a
commonly available IEEE-488 interface. This gives you a fast parallel
interface for using a myriad of faster and far higher capacity drives.
SFD1001 and 8050 come to mind right off.

> but that is still waiting for a new dos). Specs are 1428 files per
> directory with a 254 char limit for a path. You can stack paths but why?
> A single 16mb hard disk on the C= would have to be partitioned into 180k
> 'floppy-sized' chunks and then addressed using machine calls to the
> drive's rom in order to get a simple directory. There are no directories
> or even CP/M-like 'user areas' to separate data. All that has to be
> virtualized by each application within it's own code.
>
This is silly. The 1581 (the 3-1/2 Commodore drive) has a higher capacity
than this and it's *one* partition, not a bunch of 180k ones.
 
> There is no DOS for the C=. At least none that allows you to run the
You mean it accessed the drive by pure magic? Gee, that's fascinating.

> majority of software. There is none because the i/o and ram schemes never
> allowed for one. GEOS does not count because it bypasses or manipulates
> the original ROM os for greater functionality at the expense of near total
> incompatibility with non-GEOS software.
>

Ok, first of all, AFAIK GEOS only turns off the BASIC ROM - this is done
to provide more RAM for GEOS and it's applications. Secondly, saying that
the '64 had no DOS is totally silly. The DOS code lived in a ROM on the
CPU board in the floppy drive. To execute those DOS routines, you could
either install a small software wedge to give you shortcut access, access
it in your program via ML, or access it by typing a line of BASIC code.
There are DOS enhancements (JiffyDOS comes to mind) that greatly improves
the drive transfer rate as well as adds functionality to the existing
drive DOS.

Did you get your Commodore facts from an old Atari press release
or something? I mean c'mon man, this stuff is totally false!

BTW, there IS a 4MB (more?) memory upgrade for the C64, there is also a
20Mhz 65816 upgrade for it.

BTW Cameron, you can dive in here any time. :)


Man. I haven't had that much fun since the great Computer War of 1985.
*sighs*

g.
Received on Thu Nov 16 2000 - 09:20:01 GMT