Maury Markowitz

A seven page thread over whether or not turning off DMA is valid, complete with name-calling etc. Unexpected! So let me simplify matters as the author of the repo in question: The benchmarks should be run in Antic Mode 0 with the screen turned on. Any other display is considered an invalid test. Changes to the math pack - not the rest of the ROM - are allowed, but have to be clearly identified.

In the early 1980s I visited a neighbour’s house here in Canada. His father was an engineer (SPAR Aerospace IIRC) and the house was filled with every gadget of the era. Among these was a computer trainer I had seen in catalogs and I’m trying to identify it. The key feature of the system was a display consisting of a 4x4 (or 5x5?) grid of red LEDs lamps in a panel that was raised above the main desk-top console on two cylindrical supports. This placed the display at eye level. I recall the panel itself was oval shaped. This is the key feature, if you’re going to suggest a potential system and it does not include this display, it is not the system in question. I recall 8-segment LEDs being for score keeping but I am no longer sure if they were on the display panel or on the base unit. The rest of the unit was a simple desktop box with a hex pad in the lower right. Poking about in Google Images, it is overall similar in layout as the ELF II and I would not be surprised if it was based on this system. All I recall running on it was a Pong clone where the ball moved back and forth on the LED lamps. As I had seen it in a catalog, that almost certainly suggests it was Tandy/Radio Shack, but looking through historical catalogs from 1978 to 1982 I cannot find anything similar - just those 150-in-1 kits where you wire together using springs. That might suggest Heathkit, but they were not terribly popular in Canada and I can’t find anything like that in their catalogs either. I have a dim memory of the system being offered by two companies, that it was actually produced by one and was being white labeled by another… again, that strongly suggests the second company was Tandy. Anyone have any ideas?

Does anyone have a pointer to an 800XL-compatible Atari ROM that has Fastchip ROMs in place of the original Atari FP? I thought this would be easy to find but my google-fu is failing me.

Sure, but then it's no longer the same benchmark. The conditions of the test are just as important as the code. Can you run the first set in ANTIC 0?

... thereby eliminating the CPU waiting on memory. Perhaps there is some other term than "wait state" I should use? In any event, these numbers are not the same conditions, which explains the different numbers.

"Original XB 24k of GROM"... "Original XB 16K of ROM"... so did XB have both ROM and GROM for a total of 32 k?

These numbers are significantly higher than what I got under Atari800Mac for Turbo 1.5. I got an overall Index of 164. Does running under the XEP get rid of wait states perhaps?

I'm adding these to the results table, is this with Atari's original math package, or a different one?

scruss's mega-bench program. It's in the repo now.

I love that it shows people in future-space-clothing using manual plotting of their enemies like it was WWII.

I am benching BASIC XL and found something that seems odd. It appears doing a FAST in immediate had no effect, while adding a line 1 with FAST did have some effect. Is this expected? I would have thought it would work in immediate as long as you didn't edit the program?

Another suggestion: all examples of this sort should be in a monospace font. The space between DIR and >> is not clearly visible and appears to be required.

I put your version of scruss's test in the repo, thanks Faicuai! I added a new RESULTS file to the repo. I ran all tests stock for Rev C using Atari800Mac. Ahl is off by 1 or 4 seconds depending on which machine you compare to, 400/800 or 1200XL. That's interesting. If anyone has a hardware version of the 400/800 and 1200XL it would be nice to get those in there too, I am curious if the changes are due to the emulator or are just weird measurements in the original source. For instance, shouldn't the 400/800 time be identical to the 1200? Running through other versions now... BASIC XL, XE and Turbo to follow.

Documentation error then. DIR >>PRN redirects the output...

I'd like to start collecting times from various basics for another file in the repo. Can you tell me the conditions for these times? Which emulator (or machine), math pack and version of Basic++?

Love to, but it doesn't run on my Mac ? I'll go find a SDOS cart. I couldn't afford a floppy when I was a kid, so DOSes are new to me. ...up and running. Ok, how do I output to a text file? TYPE BENCH64.LST >>PRN produced a file called PRN within DOS, so I assume the whole ">>PRN" redirect only works for DIR or I can't get the syntax right. Ahhh, so for DIR its >>PRN, and for TYPE its >>PRN:. Makes perfect sense ?

I am curious if anyone can detail how Extended BASIC worked. Was it an entirely new self-contained implementation of BASIC on ROM, or did it patch the already existing ROMs with additional code? I saw one video claiming it was written in TMS9900 assembler, was that true? That seems unlikely. Was it GPL code like the original?

No joy, "Error: No DOS". Did I miss a step?

Well these are BASIC benchmarks, so all you'd learn is "BASIC is slow"!

Yes please! Did you just cut and paste the DEF FNs?

I've created a little GitHub repo with text versions of various Atari BASIC benchmarks. You can cut-and-paste them into Atari800Mac, and I assume most other emulators too. If anyone has a "more original" version of the Byte Sieve I'd love to add it. Wilkinson's version merged lines together, which makes the program run (marginally) faster, and has other changes which make it less useful for head-to-head comparisons with other platforms.

With the release of ATasm and VSCode plugins, developing Atari code on the Mac just got a whole lot easier. Kudos to everyone involved! This means the setup overhead is so reduced I can justify my own mini-project. But to do so I'd need the original Atari BASIC source in a format that ATasm understands. Does such a beast exist? I looked on atariwiki and in the threads here, but have only seen links to the Atari BASIC Sourcebook, which I believe is version A.

Hey, nice addition! Have you considered sending this as a merge to the SF page for ATasm?

I had a great email exchange with the author about the game's origins. He noted that it was used at the Naval War College, which is interesting! It was written in "pure" GEM, so it also ran on PCs with GEM installed, which is apparently the version they used. It was inspired by an article in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute on sonar, which is why it is to some degree a sonar simulation. Unfortunately he no longer has any materials related to the game, I was hoping he might have an original manual, which is lacking. I found two contemporary reviews, one in Computer Gaming World and another in ST-Log. If anyone finds more examples, please let me know!

I was trying to catch up my listening of Antic podcasts - up to 2016 now! - and in passing it was mentioned that the 800 was designed to look like a Selectric. This is painfully obvious as soon as it was mentioned, but I had never made the connection before. This really needs to be wiki article, does anyone have a solid ref? I couldn't find any in google books, lots of hits for ads with the 800 and the actual typewriter, but nothing connecting the two.