Re: SD: RE: New operating system...
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Re: SD: RE: New operating system...
>The big question here is, why? I haven't needed 10k of RAM in any
>assembly program, and I don't forsee any program needing 10000 numbers
>stored (or 1000 floating pt. nums).
Sure this is only a natural question.... Quit simply I have had several
rather ambitious projects in mind, but have always been discouraged from
making them, because of having to abide by the TI-OS's rules. And the
proof that i am not the only one to feel this way is the simple fact
that no one has come up with any programs that use more than the ~10K
allotment. It is an artistic limitiation to say the least. Here is one
project that I want to do, but becasue of the current OS, I find it hard
to imagine how to implement correctly: A 3-bit 3d rindering program
with a full Zbuffer. With he help of a friend of mine, I have come up
with a recursive triangle drawing routine that will draw any sized
triangle, by building it form a data bank of pre-drawn triangles. This
data bank itself takes up 4Kbytes. The good thing about this routnie is
that in terms of speed, it favors small triangles. Small triangles
require no calculations to draw. And slightly larger triangles only
experience a small recursive load. So objects with lots of polygons
would actually be favored by this routine over 3d objects with few big
polygons. Then there are the Cos/Sin tables, and the Multiplication
tables. Plus there needs to be room somewhere to actually load the 3d
Data so that "work" can be done on it such as rotational transformations
and so forth. Plus I might find it helpfull to keep a bank of polygon
normals. 3-bit grayscale, and a 6-bit z80 with 128kbytes of ram should
easily be able to handle such a program, but with the built in TI-OS in
the way, it is almost impossible to create such a proram that can
co-exist with the TI-OS. Now I'm sure that there is probibly a way to
make this proarm so that it does co-exist, but personally that is too
much trouble to try and do, when it would be much easier to write the
prgram for a better platform. And basically a platform of this type
would open the door to more extensive graphical applications in general.
Now I am not familure with the concept behind raycasting so I do not
know if more memory would help that out or not.
Another program I wanted to write was a SCHEME(LISP like language)
interpretor. I feel confident that the ti-86 can handle such a program,
but with such harsh limits on memory usage, I jsut could not find room
to load all the built in functionality that would make the language
useable. A platform that would allow for code segments to go anywhere
would make a SCHEME interpreter much more phesable.
As for the incompatibility issue.. Sure.. I grant that this would
be a pitfall. But personally I never had a calculator in highschool.
Of course I may have gone to one of the less intensive highschools I
don'tknow, but I never really found a graphing calculator necessary.
The only reason I got one was for the Assembly stuff anyway. Maybe I
should ahve gone with another device if that is all I wanted, but at the
time, I did not know of any otehr devices in a resonable price range.
Later,
David E. West
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