The following text was written by Michael
Cook:
Basically what this article is about is a need for cross-calc
compiling tool (one for the Z80 based calcs and maybe one for the Motorola based ones). All
of the Z80 calcs use the same operations. Then only difference is the ROM locations, etc.
So the way I see it, all that we'd have to do is make some small changes in the way we write
source code and we'd end up with one game and exact copies for all the calculators.
So how would this work you say? It's simple. Instead of calling something like _PUTS on the
83, or something else on one of the other calcs, you would call something like
_SHOW_STRING_NORM and there would be one of these type things for each of the routines. Then
when the program was compiled, a different version would be produced for each calculator,
replacing things like above with the correct ROM call. Things like sprites could also be
included because they would use calls like these that would work on all the calcs.
The other way (and in my opinion superior) would be to make one shell for all of the calcs.
All the calls would be put to the shell and redirected. This would take almost no time and
then every call would have an equivalent on every calc. With this there would be one more
shell but I think that we'd all agree that any feature losses would be fine compared to the
giant library of games.
So what other things should be done? It won't be too hard
to make the pre-compiler that you would send the code to, which would put certain bits of
code only in the 85 version or only on the 83 version. Then you could make a program for a
96x64 pixel screen like the 83 and the extra 32 columns of pixels would be used on the 85.
This would allow games to look their best on all calcs with the same code! I'd like to thank
you for your time and hope you consider this article. I'd love to see programmers like Jimmy
Mardell, Andreas Ess, Bill Nigel, and others work on this.
