Hello,

* On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:39:56PM -0700 Michael Steil wrote:
> On 1 Apr 2009, at 16:43, Lord Doomicus wrote:
>> So I've been playing with pagetable's amazing ansi C version of Basic
>> 2.0 on my Sun box.  It runs much faster than a Real C-64.  Nice for
>> things like my Monte Carlo pi program.
[...]
>> But, then I got the idea, that maybe, a VIC and SID emulator could be
>> graphed on to it to have a high speed C64 BASIC environment.
[...]

> I'm the author of cbmbasic for UNIX. This sounds cool

I think you both are missing one aspect: The CBM BASIC 2.0 which can be
compiled with Michael's sources is *not* the C64 BASIC 2.0. The C64
BASIC 2.0 (which is almost exactly the same as the VIC20 BASIC 2.0)
seems to be a BASIC 4.0, where commands were removed again. So, you
might get some behaviourial differences to the C64 BASIC.

Furthermore, note that I would say that the speed penalties of VICE (or
other emulators) are mainly because of the emulation of VIC, SID, CIA,
and the floppy. I don't think the CPU itself is the biggest culprit. So,
your advantages might be limited.


Having said that:

VICE already has the "virtual device traps". With them, it emulates some
IEC routines in the emulator core instead of directly by emulating the
6502 instructions. It should not be that much work to use the same
approach to "connect" a BASIC 2.0 emulator to VICE.

Of course, one question remains: Is it worth it? How many (interesting)
programs consist only of BASIC, and would benefit from this?
Furthermore, switching off all features not needed in your preferred
emulator should speed up your program by a considerable factor.

Just the opinion of
Spiro.

-- 
Spiro R. Trikaliotis                              http://opencbm.sf.net/
http://www.trikaliotis.net/                     http://www.viceteam.org/

       Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing list