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| A 35th anniversary salute to Radio Shack's TRS-80 |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-08-04 04:17:08 |
| "Quick - name the most important personal computer of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those of you who mentioned the legendary Apple II - that's fine. I respect your decision. Forced to think objectively in 2012, I may even agree. But if you just named Radio Shack's TRS-80, you made me smile. Your choice is entirely defensible. And back in the TRS-80's heyday, I not only would have agreed with it but would have vehemently opposed any other candidate." |
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| RE[2]: Ah, yes. |
| By JLF65 on 2012-08-05 17:31:06 |
| You CAN blow people's minds with your new RAD skillz! Folks looking to do some Z80 programming often do their own programs for the old Sega Master System, or the MSX computer. You can find flash carts for the SMS to even run your game on the real machine. |
 - Score: 2 |
| RE: Ah, yes. |
| By zima on 2012-08-05 18:33:01 |
|
> the Z80 was a joy to program... perhaps the best of the 8-bit CPUs. However, the 6502 was clearly king of the day, being in nearly every 8-bit computer of any worth. Hm, the families of MSX, Amstrad/Schneider, and Spectrum (plus numerous clones) had some worth, I think. And what about many ~business CP/M machines? In the 6502 camp (sorting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis... by CPU type) worthy are the families of Apple II, Commodore, Atari, and Acorn. So perhaps fairly comparable proportions, especially considering that only the Apple II was extensively cloned in the latter group - but in the former you have Spectrum clones and numerous MSX & CP/M manufacturers. And I can see some very clear geographical delineation, Z80 more used in home computers (the 8-bit micros we most remember) from outside North America, more popular outside of it (and some mostly Western European, culturally at least, countries) - perhaps that contributes to your perception? |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[7]: Nothing special |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-05 18:39:11 |
|
At work we use Dynamics, which uses MS SQL. Microsoft makes the bare Dynamics and all kinds of companies can build upon it. Our Dynamics partner doesn't have any SQL experts, which seems a bit odd considering it's a lot of SQL stuff. When things don't work they have to contact Microsoft and Microsoft often doesn't know either. When I last coded "seriously" it was early 1990's. Back then you now what happened and if unexpected things occurred you'd know where to look and where to insert debug stuff. This annoys me with these modern coders. They rely so much on other people's code: libs, APIs, SQL, etc... when something doesn't work they need to contact other people and then the clock starts ticking. An answer in 2-3 days is considered very quick. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[7]: Nothing special |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-05 18:43:22 |
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I stopped coding in the BASIC/Assembler period. BASIC was slow, Assembler was fast. So each time anything but Assembler is used I get the feeling things aren't as effective/fast as they could be. But I promisse I will start learning a (modern) language. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[6]: Nothing special |
| By chiwaw on 2012-08-05 19:11:45 |
|
Well an expert .NET programmer would probably outperform a terrible C++ programmer. Often time execution slowness is more about bad code design, unoptimized algorithms, etc. But assuming equally expert in both languages, C++ will definitely have the edge, as it run on top of at least one less layer. As for how much faster, I'm not sure. I know .NET is getting a whole lot more efficient over time. The (video game) company I work for switched from C++ to C# last year. We lost a bit of performance, but oh man is producing code C# so much more fun and comfortable and easy. And also our bug counts went down dramatically. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: Ah, yes. |
| By chiwaw on 2012-08-05 19:15:01 |
| Oh once in a while, like a werewolf under a full moon, I get infused with a Z80 rage, re-install my Colecovision devkit and start homebrewing for a little while. I never finished anything at home tho. Usually the rage goes away 3-4 days later and I think "wooaa what the fuck happened?" and then I happily go back to C#. :-P |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[8]: Nothing special |
| By rdean400 on 2012-08-05 19:30:16 |
| Assembler can be optimized better than most HLL's, but it should also be said that modern optimizing compilers produce better machine code than all but the most elite of programmers could, with a fraction of the effort. At some point, you have to determine how much it will cost to achieve perfect optimization. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Were TRS-80 clones legal? |
| By henderson101 on 2012-08-05 21:20:05 |
|
The British market for TRS-80 was dominated by the Dragon 32 and Dragon 64, which were not exactly compatible, but TRS-80 alikes. Probably the biggest issue with the TRS-80 was the PAL standard, which broke a lot of the graphical tricks used on the TRS-80. > I suspect in the UK, the TRS-80's biggest claim to fame was being the development system used by a lot of Sinclair ZX Spectrum programmers to develop for the (frankly awful to code on) Spectrum. A lot of that was availability. Matthew Smith developed Manic Miner on the TRS-80 because he had it to hand. I don't know of anyone else that did that, but sure there were some. Let's be honest, assembler is assembler, the computer has little to do with that. To answer your other question, Matthew Smith loaded the TRS-80 code by writing a custom machine code tape loader on the Spectrum. The code of which is in the released version of Manic Miner and baffled a lot of hackers till it was explained! > The TRS-80 was a good Z80 system, but once the world's greatest 8-bit micro of all time, the BBC Micro (which destroyed the Apple II that had come out years earlier), it was all over in the UK for the TRS-80 for "serious" 8-bit users, whom I suspect mostly ditched their TRS-80's for the BBC Micro. Hmmmm. This is pure fantasy. The BBC was stupidly expensive. I was 8 when the Spectrum came out. I grew up in the 8 bit era. I knew a lot of people with computers. The ZX81 was extremely popular. The Spectrum was the most popular 8-bit by a country mile. The Commodore 64 was a close second. I knew 2 people with Atari 800xl's, I knew a guy with a Commodore 16, a couple of people with Oric 1 or Atmos, and a few people with Electrons** and Amstrad CPC's. The only people I ever met with a BBC B was, #1 my uncle, who went through Dragon 64 to BBC B and was obsessed with the game Elite. Second was the boffy sons of my High School English teacher, who lived on the corner of my street. By 1989, the ST and Amiga were coming on the scene and blasting everything out of the water. Apple just never made inroads in the UK because we already had our own strong market by the time the hardware became reasonably priced. ** The Electron was a distinct computer that had some compatibility with the BBC, but half the games didn't work and it lost all of the cooler stuff. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[9]: Nothing special |
| By moondevil on 2012-08-05 21:46:21 |
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With most modern processors (x86, x64, Itanium, ARM v8), this is no longer true. The set of out-of-order execution conditions, parallel pipelines, types of SIMD instructions, multithreading, multiplecores, cache levels, NUMA memory is so big, that only genius would be able to do it for a specific processor/motherboard. Assembly programming is only manageable by humans for the simple PIC processors, or some of the RISC models available in the market. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[7]: Nothing special |
| By moondevil on 2012-08-05 21:48:32 |
|
Yeah, most game studios I know have moved from C++/MFC to C#/WinForms/WPF for their tooling. There are some that moved to C++/Qt though. Do you guys ngen your games upon installation? |
| - Score: 2 |
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