In <Pine.LNX.4.10.10011160656250.22735-100000_at_war.deltasoft.com>, on
11/16/00
at 11:08 AM, Gene Buckle <geneb_at_deltasoft.com> said:
>> The Commodore 64 had the worlds worst rom operating system ever created.
>Are you referring to the ROM that existed in the drive?
No, to the machine's ROM. The Basic was a quick hack of Mbasic and didn't
take advantage of the custom hardware on the C=.
>> 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.
Maybe I did get that from some 80's propoganda. Sorry. The drive was
still Godaweful slow. Not because it is serial either. There was
something badly wrong with thier design.
>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.
That was the 1mb floppy right? I didn't know that ran on a different buss.
>> 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.
Not by magic. By machine language calls to the drive's rom. This is not
a complete dos, but a kernel you can make calls to. Imagine CP/M. Then
subtract the command interpreter. Sure, all the calls are there but it's
vastly more difficult to use.... If you go ahead and write a ccp you lose
compatability because of the ram it takes up. I don't know if there is a
cartridge-based DOS for the C=. Spartados X is a 64k cart that bitbangs
the ram/rom to avoid bumping memlo.
The only reason I can imagine for doing it the way they did is to save ram
for applications compatibility. If so, this was poor planning.
>> 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.
>>
>Did you get your Commodore facts from an old Atari press release or
>something? I mean c'mon man, this stuff is totally false!
Maybe some...
>BTW, there IS a 4MB (more?) memory upgrade for the C64, there is also a
>20Mhz 65816 upgrade for it.
Yea, there is the Turbo 816 upgrade for the Atari too. It never went very
far though. In 816 mode compatability suffers badly.
>Man. I haven't had that much fun since the great Computer War of 1985.
>*sighs*
Me too. Back then though a lot of the folks were just ignorant flamers.
This group is a bit more mature and knowledgable.... ;-)
Regards,
Jeff
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Received on Thu Nov 16 2000 - 10:08:11 GMT