Re: A86: Re: Large ASM

To: assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org
Subject: Re: A86: Re: Large ASM
From: rabidcow@juno.com
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 23:16:57 -0700
Reply-To: assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org

what for?
there's two fonts built in already.  you can get sideways (i think,
*i've* got it anyway) and funky formatted text output routines off of
ticalc and include them in the program.  they're not that big cuz they
use the font bitmaps in rom.  
in any case, most games don't need 5 different fonts available.

text is a slow operation to begin with.  putting it in a library makes it
10x slower & you can't store the strings (or any other variables) in
_asm_exec_ram.  most likely you'll end up having to use absolute
addressing to pass the string pointers, which makes it even slower, not
to mention a tremendously annoying process.

bloat had bugs if i remember what people said.  in any case the library
was only for compression.  most compression routines are set up to
require much more processor power on the compression end than for
decompression.  that way you can have your nice pentium 3 with 128mb ram 
do the compression and have a tiny bit of z80 code do decompression.

libraries may have had a place when the ti-86 was introduced, but it's
far too late now.

-josh

On Sun, 23 Jul 2000 05:11:20 GMT "" <cavanc@hotmail.com> writes:
> 
> Yeah, I know about bloat, but it isn't used much.
> I guess nobody likes the idea of a font library.
> 
> Cavan
> 
> >From: "David Phillips" <david@acz.org>
> >Reply-To: assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org
> >To: <assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org>
> >Subject: Re: A86: Re: Large ASM
> >Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 23:03:54 -0600
> >
> >
> >Yeah.  It's called bloat.  Or use Lite86, the decompression code 
> is, what,
> >about 25 bytes?  And that little bit of space in every program is 
> more than
> >made up for by the ease of use of not having to load a separate 
> program.  
> >If
> >you only have one thing on your calc, do you want to have to load a 
> 



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