Thursday, November 22, 2018

Breaking the chains... of the 8K barrier

Only one day after deciding to finally ditch the MC-10 8K ROM limitation, a couple small changes have pushed the new ROM to almost 10% faster than the original, and the actual executable code is smaller.  I simply dumped the valid token check in the main loop and extended the command dispatch table.  Anything invalid jumps strait to SN ERROR, and valid tokens are executed quicker.  The table wastes some space, but there will be less wasted space as I add Extended BASIC commands to the ROM.

This does not include the code that uses multiplication to convert ASCII numbers to binary instead of division, and the code that stores the current line pointer instead of the current line number.

Solitaire Solver, original ROM vs new ROM 

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