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From: lphillips@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca (Larry Phillips)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Z machine et al
Message-ID: <2438@lpami.wimsey.bc.ca>
Date: 30 Dec 90 12:02:27 GMT
Lines: 39
Return-Path: <lpami!lphillips>
To: van-bc!rnews

In <673@cbmger.UUCP>, peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) writes:
>In article <1990Dec28.001940.25138@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>>
>>Not too sure it is fair to characterize the Pet as slow;
>
>Oh, I LOVE my old 8032. Running BASIC, it's not so much slower
>than a normal Amiga with AmigaBasic.
>
>>On the other hand, dumping text to the screen from BASIC was painfully
>>slow, even for those days.  Perhaps that is where the perception of a
>>slow BASIC arose.
>
>Hmm, but there was another issue with screen output on the PETs,
>which I miss on all the current computers like Amiga or PCs: the
>cursor control characters that worked blindingly fast when used
>in a PRINT statement. I had a demo using simple PRINTs with whole
>text lines shooting in from the left or right, just by issuing
>proper insert or delete control chars. There the benefit of a
>memory mapped simpe character screen storage was VERY apparent.
>
>Simply stated: I can't do this in a similar way on the Amiga!
>(But in another way it works: with graphical GET and PUT, but
>that's another story.)

The console device supports a full set of cursor positioning sequences, and is
indeed blindingly fast. In addition to the normal up/down/left/right/home,
etc., you have 'erase to EOL/EOS', cursor positioning by row/column, and more.
I don't know if these are usable from Basic, but if Basic uses the
console.device, it should work fine.

-larry

--
The best way to accelerate an MsDos machine is at 32 ft/sec/sec.
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|   //   Larry Phillips                                                 |
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