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Path: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!muscat!striepe
From: striepe@muscat.UUCP (Harald Striepe)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari
Subject: Re: KERMIT and ACTION
Message-ID: <113@muscat.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 11-Jan-86 20:57:20 EST
Article-I.D.: muscat.113
Posted: Sat Jan 11 20:57:20 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 13-Jan-86 03:11:47 EST
References: <8601021348.AA25062@ucbvax.berkeley.edu> <1877@uwmacc.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: DEC Western Region Operations, Santa Clara, CA
Lines: 28


> >Also, I know that they'd LIKE Me to get the cartridge rather than have
> >action! put onto a diskette, but is it possible to have someone put it
> >on diskette for me?  Would I still be able to run the stuff? and compile
> >it?

Another reason (aside from the piracy issue) why you cannot have ACTION!
(or, for that matter, BASIC XL/XE or MAC/65 with DDT) on disk is that these
are the only cartridges making use of a technique called BANKSWITCHING.
They are actually 16K carts taking up only 8K of address space.  If you use
OSS's DOS XL, DOS will use the RAM "hidden" by the cart for even more
program memory.  The capability to use this feature is another indication of
the fabulous design and forethought that went into these little 8 bitters.
I just got another one of them! The newest incarnation (130XE) carries on
the proud tradition with a nicely thought out approach to bank switching
its 128K RAM and supporting its parallel bus.

By the way,  you can obtain a runtime library to make your action programs
independent of the cart,  or modifiy the IO library to do program
development for the C64 or Apple (you better know the respective OS's to do
that...).

-- 
Harald Striepe
DEC APB-WEST
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