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"An Interrupt Driven Real-Time Clock for TMS 9900" 1982 Byte Article


philipj

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Here's a little article I ran into at "archive.org" from an 1980 "Byte" magazine... A link to the web-link is below. I haven't read it fully, but I do understand that those interrupts can be pretty fast when used properly, especially on the TI-99 with it's limitations. I've attached a PDF file to this post to specific article discussing an "Interrupt Driven Real Time Clock" with source code. I bet there's all sorts of useful things that can come from the article for anyone who's interested.

 

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-09

An Interrupt-Driven Real-Time Clock for the TMS 9900.pdf

Edited by philipj
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The problem with a standard 99/4A is that you can't change the interrupt vectors, as they are in ROM. Thus you are much more limited in what you can do with interrupts. There's a user defined interrupt you can use, but it's pretty inefficient, compared to a "real" interrupt. If you have a console modified like mine, you can change the vectors, but that's not any standard.

If you try something similar on the 99/4A, you'd also find that things like disk access implies that no interrupts are serviced, so the clock would lose some time there.

 

I have a real-time clock implemented in hardware in my machine instead. It keeps track of time, even when the computer isn't on.

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Ok here's a link to a website that found a few weeks ago concerning interrupts specifically for the TI-99/4A system... I'm still learning as much as I can about the computer so for the moment I'm simply fishing for as much info as I can at this point so any thoughts posted here will certainly be helpful and documented. I'm really interested in doing graphics and sound for the system, but when I saw the article I was pretty excited about it and was looking forward to using it for graphical purposes, but a simple clock would be a great way to start off programming.

 

http://www.nouspikel.com/ti99/titechpages.htm

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I meant that the user interrupt is pretty inefficient since it's a part of the computer's full interrupt routine. Which checks for several other things too, not only the user interrupt. If you can modify the interrupt vector directly, which you can't as long as it's in ROM, then you can make an interrupt routine dedicated to driving a clock, for example.

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Yes, but you can turn off the other stuff with the flag byte (83C2), and then it's not so long from the interrupt occurrance until it reaches this portion of code. And if you were using the console interrupt routine anyway, the user interrupt should be only a minimal additional effort.

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