Thursday, December 7, 2017

Status update of a few projects

The USB serial adapter finally showed up so I can start working on the 68HC11 port of BASIC.  The IDE port is going to be on hold until I get that up and running.

The comments for the VZ disassembly are ready to go, I just need to extract the ones that match the VZ ROM and put them in the sed file.  Then it's just a matter of commenting a few pieces of code VTEC added to the ROM.  One of the things I ran across when benchmarking these old machines is how horribly slow the VZ BASIC is.  Even though it's clocked faster than the TRS-80 Model III and they both share a lot of code, the VZ takes almost twice as long on benchmarks.  The patches VTEC made clearly didn't help it.  Once I convert the disassembly back to a source file, I should be able to run a code profiler on it to see where the biggest bottleneck is and to fix it.  There's plenty of unused space for fixes.


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