ag@floyd.ATT.COM (03/18/89)
I love the CoCo, I really do. The only thing I DON'T like about the CoCo is the 64K process space. I know this is a limitation of the 6809, but I want to port a music/MIDI program to the CoCo, except that the object code will be much bigger than 64K. Chain it, you say? OK, but how do I define any usable data structures (using malloc) and still have pointer access to them in the various parts of the program. I've even thought about writing my own version of malloc that grabs pages of memory outside the process space and provides a way to access them, except that pointers in os9 are 16 bits, which again equals 64K. (Can't get away from this, even if I tried!!) The moral of the story is that I'd have to go in and re-write the program to use my special set of data memory. This would not be a fun thing to do, even if I had the time and knowledge to do it! That's why I want a computer with nice linear memory. You know, from 1 byte to 1,000,000 bytes. Even if there's a memory manager in the way, let me get some serious data/code spaces!!! Maybe I should look at the os9/68000 systems. Maybe I should become a priest and forget about all of this.... Ag