Date   : Fri, 20 Oct 1989 02:15:00 GMT
From   : mailrus!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!torsqnt!tmsoft!masnet!canremote!wayne.hortensiu@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (WAYNE HORTENSIU)
Subject: Turbo Modula-2 REL prob

My sincere thanks to all those who responded to my query regarding
getting the REL utility in Turbo Modula-2 to work properly. To
summarize; REL cannot be linked to a .COM file, and requires something
greater than a 58K CP/M system to function, no matter how small the
original assembler source. I have a stripped down floppy-only 61K system 
that does the job even on a 1500 line assembler program. Now if I could
only get around having to reboot from floppy ever time I change
something in the assembler module... TM2 is slooooow on floppies!
 
To all those who wonder just what I was up to (including a reply from, I 
believe, Sweden!), I was attempting to get the planetarium program, SKY
v3.2, running on my Ampro with a homebrew V9938 graphics card. I am
happy to report success. Since my system supports grey-scale or colour
graphics, I've extended the program to display the star magnitudes as
different shades of gray, which looks quite nice. I also managed to get
a Kraft micromouse hooked up and working, which was considerably easier
than I had anticipated. And in a fit of inspiration, I buckled down and
figured out how to use a sprite for the arrow pointer. All in all, a
wonderful learning experience, lots of fun, and a remarkably useful
program to boot.
 
However (there's _always_ a however!), the time required to recalculate
the positions of the 2000+ stars, planets and galaxies in the database
is quite noticeable; about 3.5 minutes. Given the amout of floating
point trig calculations required for each star, it's understandable, but 
I'd like it to be faster, if possible, without giving in and buying an
AT.
 
Has anyone had experience with interfacing floating point processors to
a Z80 based system? If so, I'd appreciate hearing about your
experiences, pro or con. So far, I've investigated the possibility of
hooking up an 8088/8087 pair. The 8087 uses a real number format very
similar to the IEEE format used by TM2. The only difference I've
encountered so far is a difference of 1 in the biasing of the exponent.
This does not seem to be a difficult problem in conversion, as far as
I've been able to tell, but I don't know what else is available out
there.
 
So; any suggestions?
---
 * Via ProDoor 3.1R