On Fri, Dec 03, 1999 at 04:43:13PM +0000, Andrew Collier wrote: > The technical manual describes a mechanism for allocating space in small > chunks, but I don't think the ROM provides any direct support for it,
Correct. > and > I don't know of many programs which use it properly. Most of them were probably written by me (and haven't been published - except Sam Play, which was on Syncytium). > The major problem with it is that you have to write your code to be > entirely relocatable - not impossible, but quite a major pain (and likely > to produce slower code). Nonsense. All you have to do is add some code to the installation routine which fixes up all the absolute addresses to run at the new location and it will run at exactly the same speed as before. I think the solution with BDOS really is to make it a 32K DOS with the second 16K being optional. That is, 16K of it is loaded when you boot, and if you require the extra features then you do a command which loads the second 16K. (Or make it 8K or 4K if the full 16 isn't needed.) imc
