Date   : Fri, 12 Aug 1994 22:44:20 +0100 (BST)
From   : clr1@...
Subject: Re: i see basic! :-)

> Thanks for your pointers I finally see BASIC coming up.  I used the
> OS ROM hack in James B emulator (Ian Stapleton should get a mention
> in here too!) to intercept OSWRCH and OSRDCH and the system booted
> up with a prompt.

Jammy sod! I'm still trying to work out what the O/S is doing. Do you 
think I should just run it and hope for the best? At the moment I've been 
tracing through the instructions it executes, which is a pretty dull task!

> The source code is in C and has a lot of similarities with James B
> compiler, and without his help, Chris Lam and many others on this
> discussion list I wouldn't have got this far.  The emulator is
> running dismally slow under MS-DOS on a 386DX-33 and 'feels' slow on
> a 486DX2-66.  On a 386DX-33 it is operating at about 30 times slower
> than a real beeb.

30 times slower?!? That's pretty awful (no offence)! I would have thought 
that even a C version would be a bit faster than that. Although I have 
yet to get BASIC going, I would have thought that it would go no slower 
than about 1/2 Beeb speed. However, I might retract that when I get it going!

Actually, having written this I think I will just implement those two 
calls and let the thing loose. You never know; it just *might* work...

+-------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| /-- |_| /-- | (~  | "And the driving is like the driving of Jehu,   |
| \-- | | |   | _)  | the son of Nimshi, for he drives furiously."    |
+-------------------+-------------------- Second Book of Kings 9 v20 -+