Re: LZ: my 2 frozen cents on USGARD


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Re: LZ: my 2 frozen cents on USGARD



ariwsi@juno.com wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 3 Jul 1997 02:07:36 -0400 "Max Mansour" <maxm@ziplink.net>
> writes:
> 
> >His new shell, cshell, is far superior then Usgard
(for ease of use by users)
> 
> 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!
Not anymore.... (read on)
> 
> :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
Ummm... that was from version 2.0; we're now up to version 3.05, and the
only code from ZShell that remains is the VAT search routine...  AND I'm
currently rewriting that, too.

> >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)!
True, but how often is (slow) speed _REALLY_ a problem for us???
Bottom line:  who cares?
The only thing that I do agree about is that relocation can save a few
bytes (in large progs).

> >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!
I don't know if I would say that...
Like I said before:  * USGUARD is keyed towards programmers, not users. 
:(

-- 
~Keith
TSK3000@Prodigy.Net
----
VISIT THE OFFICIAL CSHELL HOMEPAGE AT:
http://pages.prodigy.net/tsk3000/CShell/


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