Re: LZ: my 2 frozen cents on USGARD


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Re: LZ: my 2 frozen cents on USGARD



On Thu, 3 Jul 1997 02:07:36 -0400 "Max Mansour" <maxm@ziplink.net>
writes:

>His new shell, cshell, is far superior then Usgard

In what way is it superior?  USGARD allows programs to be much smaller
and much faster.  The size gain from programs being smaller is more than
enough to offset the extra size of USGARD, so CShell turns out much less
memory-efficient than USGARD.  CShell is hardly a "new" shell, it's
simply
a somewhat enhanced ZShell.  The CShell documentation states:

:I removed the credits screen after CShell-NT v2.0, as I decided to admit
:that I'm not the original author of most of the code!

:Again, I'd like to thank Dan Eble, Magnus Hagander, and Rob Taylor for
:the code I hacked from ZShell, in order to make CShell-NT fully
compatible
:with Zshell.  This code is about 75% of CShell-NT

>And just so you know, superiority doesn't mean tons of features.  it
means >have what is needed, in as small a space as possible.  

USGARD has what is needed (relocation).  CShell doesn't.  USGARD saves
enough space by allowing programs to be smaller to more than make up
for the slightly larger shell.  Even if you don't use any libraries at
all, relocation alone will reduce the size of programs by about 8%.

In addition, relocation gives a huge performance increase!  A "call
&label" 
is 9 times as fast as CALL_(label), and "jp &label" runs 14.3 times as
fast
as JUMP_(label)!

>You keep saying how usgard will become the sole gaming shell for the 85
--
>i haven't seen it, in fact, i have seen only 1 (one) usgard game
released
>by a non-usgard developer/beta-tester.

That's probably because all of the best TI-85 programmers are USGARD
developers or beta testers!


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