Posted By
Gaia
on 2008-10-20
17:13:50
|  Re: The same question asked about a million times no doubt
The plus/4 BASIC is not slow because of Microsoft (although I appreciate the attempt, who knows maybe they are also responsible for the global warming). It is indeed slower than the C64 BASIC despite the machine being slightly faster in machine code and the reason is that in the very last moment (as Bil Herd once explained) they had to build in this memory bank switching they never intended to do, so basically every time there's a RAM read operation, the machine has to disable IRQ, disable ROM, read the RAM, enable ROM again, enable IRQ and return back to the main ROM program block. See the code at $0479 in the RAM for an example.
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