Altirra Extended BASIC

[+Stephen]

43 minutes ago, Ricky Spanish said:

I'm assuming that the Altirra emulator has built-in FP package that Altirra basic can access, and hence,

is no better than atari basic with real hardware ? Thanks.

Couple things - Altirra the emulator, has a setting, which will accelerate floating point.  This means, that when the emulated Atari requests a floating point op, it gets it immediately.  This is different, to the potential for updated code in Altirra BASIC.

 

This is to say, Altirra BASIC, running on real hardware, is faster than Atari BASIC.  But - Altirra with the above mentioned feature, is faster than real hardware.

[phaeron]

6 hours ago, Ricky Spanish said:

So I did Ahl's benchmark test with real hardware, in this case my 1200XL Rev 10 OS, 256k memory.

It took 290 seconds to complete (v1.54 & v1.28). With BASIC XE it took 48 seconds.

 

I'm assuming that the Altirra emulator has built-in FP package that Altirra basic can access, and hence,

is no better than atari basic with real hardware ? Thanks.

 

No, I don't know why you would assume that. Altirra BASIC does not have any special hooks into the emulator, it calls into the OS math pack similarly to Atari BASIC. It runs faster than Atari BASIC in both emulation and on real hardware even with the same math pack because it has a faster expression evaluator and control flow statements.

 

Also, note that you're posting in the Altirra Extended BASIC thread. Altirra Extended BASIC runs much faster than Altirra BASIC because it takes advantage of the much larger ROM space and has its own internal math pack that is a lot faster than the OS math pack.