cole@clio.UUCP (05/05/87)
My Dad just bought a Sinclair QL, a 68k based machine at a Sinclair users fest in Indianapolis (price only $100). I'm curious about the capabilities of this machine. Are there any Pascal or C compilers available for it... what type of operating systems does it support?
upl@puff.WISC.EDU (Future Unix Gurus) (05/07/87)
There are at least two 'C' compilers, (one of which is Lattice) and two or three Pascal compilers. Metacomco, an English company, makes both a 'C' and a Pascal compiler, along with a decent editor which can be run in the background, and called when you need it. The QL supports single user multi-tasking. Job control is achieved by level two interrupt driven scheduler. But, if you want to enter supervisor mode and disable the scheduler, TRAP #0 enters supervisor mode. The 68008 has an identical instruction set to the vanilla 68000, but physically it has an 8-bit data bus, which results in twice as many fetches to decode a given instruction. This means that any 68008 based machine will run slower than its 68000 based counterpart (just because of the difference in bus sizes) I have been writing a graphics kernal, and have just finished some 3-d routines. I write in assembly languge, and all of my loops use only reg- ister varibles, pointers, and counters. Also, all of my loop instructions are one word (two bytes long) - this uses the '08 to its fullest (32-bit internal, 8-bit external). Because of the generality of the registers, and because any data register can be used as an accumulator, my code is much tighter and faster than it would be on an similar 80xxx based machine. (My QL, which cost me $250.00, runs faster than my friends PC AT :-) ) Would anybody here know where I could get the timing break- down for 68008 instruction set (not the 68000, or '020). I'm writing some I/O drivers, and this would be a big help!! Thanx in advance. -Eric Bazan