To: 999 (all members)
From: D7X (Martin Hodgson)
Subject: 6502Em and VDFS
The VDFS is rather lacking in its
abilities, as Sprow stated last issue.
Thanks to D6G for making *HELP work.
Has he any solution to the
inabilty of the VDFS to recognise that
the '$' sign in a filing command
referes to the root directory ? This
used to give problems with the 8BS mag
discs, before they were modified to
suit. I have some of the Level 9 games
(Lancelot, Time & Magick etc) which
have many filing system calls which
fall over because of this "feature".
Acorns' 65Host does not have this
problem, so why should 6502Em ?
Incidentally one or two people have
been asking about DFS readers to use on
the 32 bit computers. I have ArcDFS
from Dabs Press. This runs in the
Desktop and allows you to deal with
files on a DFS disc just as if it were
ADFS, dragging and dropping selections
of files to copy them to and from DFS
and ADFS, setting Access etc. It also
integrates with both 6502Em and
65Host, allowing you to access DFS
discs from within the Emulators. The
only problem with the version I have
is that it fails to *CAT discs
properly from the Emulators. The only
other problem is that, presumably,
Dabs Press are no longer interested in
producing the product after all these
years.
To: 999 (all members)
From: D7X (Martin Hodgson)
Subject: 6502Em Speed (lack of)
I have been using 6502Em for well over
a year, and am now on version 2.00, so
thought I would add my comments to
those made recently about it.
I use 6502Em on a 25 MegHz A5000, with
Floating Point Accelerator, and 4MB of
memory
I was surprised that Robert Sprowson
(D6G) in the last issue of the 8BS mag
found it slow, given the speed of his
RISC-PC. Yes, 6502Em is a little slow
on my A5000. I tested it in two ways
:-
1) Running a game - Chuckie Egg,
timing 5 traverses of the little man
across the screen. His speed is fixed
by the computer, not the user.
2) running a litle program loop,thus:
10 FOR N=0 TO 2000:X=5*N/6
20 PRINT X:PRINT''N
30 NEXT N
I obtained the following times (secs).
Shorter is faster and better,
obviously.
real 6502EM 65Host
BBC B "BBC B""Master"
CHUCKIE 24 38 55 24
Loop 60 102 157 162
So in BBC B emulation 6502Em is 60% to
70% slower than a real BEEB. Master
128 emulation is 100% to 160% slower.
Acorns' 65Host is interesting, being
as fast as the real BEEB on a game,
but horribly slow over a bit of simple
arithmatic !
Despite all this, I do find 6502Em
pretty good. I normally use it in BBC
B mode. The loss in speed is not often
apparent. When running Revs for
example you simply hold the
accelerator down a bit longer. Top
speed must be a little limited, but I
spin off the track at well below max
speed ! There is only Chuckie Egg (the
wife's fav game), and Strykers' Run
have obvious problems.
It, along with its companion program
!Tapes have very good facilities for
dealing with Tape to Disc transferes.
Also, unlike 65Host,it can be entered
from the Desktop, with a program up
and running just by double clicking on
the required program. Much simpler
than the system used with 65Host to
set up a self-running application.
PS I wrote this using Wordwise Plus,
in 6502Em on the A5000, without any
pain due to slow response times (or
any other cause for that matter).
To: ELT
From: D5B (Jon Ripley)
Subject: Anybody out there?
Hi y'all, this is Jon Ripley here, I
was just wondering if the ELITE
section in 8BS still exists???
Send in your messages to 'ELT' to keep
this thing alive!
Cookie: I'm a Hollywood writer; so I
put on a sports jacket and take off my
brain.