TI-99/4A Floppies

[Chuck Guzis]

On 1 Oct 2007 at 16:01, Jim Battle wrote:

> No, the real reason was that the BASIC was a two-level interpreter.  TI 
> didn't have the time/resources to write a BASIC interpreter in native 
> assembly, so they procured a BASIC interpreter written in an abstract 
> machine code, kinda like p-code, such that TI would then just have to 
> write an assembly level program to interpret the "p-code".  I'm sure 
> they made other enhancements to this BASIC interpreter in order to 
> support the unique features of the hardware, though.

Back around 1978 or so, I recall visiting Ryan-McFarland and chatting 
with Dave McFarland about some changes to their BASIC 
compiler/interpreter.  He mentioned TI and I let it pass without 
comment.  But yes, indeed, RM BASIC was implemented in a type of P-
CODE for both the parsing/compiling and runtime.  It was hideously 
slow on an 8085 and I can't believe it was much better on a 9900. I 
wonder if that "TI Version" that they were doing was the selfsame one 
that ended up on a real TI product.

It was bad enough that we did our own after trying to use the RM 
software.

Cheers,
Chuck