Re: [stella] new bankswitching scheme ?

Subject: Re: [stella] new bankswitching scheme ?
From: Adam Thornton <adam@xxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2004 15:44:10 -0600
I like the idea of a large mappable memory; this would perhaps give me
the ability to write a macro assembler that let me write code as if I
had a fairly large address space available, and then handled all the
paging for me.  The more the merrier--I have no problem with mapping
2-page chunks.

On the other hand, it does seem conceptually cleaner to do one byte to
select the page, and one byte of addresses within the page.  I wonder if
you could extend this to a two-level map, where one byte selects the
entry from the list of pages.  Then you could get 256^3, or 1M,
addressable bytes.

This, in turn, I could use to further my text-adventure-on-the-2600
explorations, because with 24K available, I could do a Scott Adams
SAGA-system port (the games are about 16K of data, and I think I could
get a terp and I/O routines in 8K easily).  With 128K, I could do most
(maybe all) of the z3 Infocom games.  With a 512K map, I could do all z5
games, I think.

SAGA may be, just barely, possible with a 128-byte RAM (I haven't
actually tried), although most of it is ROMmable, since most of the game
is fairly simple and static opcode and action tables.  But z-code games
need more writeable memory than that.

Adam
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