Posted By
MMS
on 2019-12-19
07:34:17
 |  Re: A reply to "The Letter (3-PLUS-1)"
Ehm, hard to belive it would come close to SVS-Calc 
Actually, anyone can tell, why the Word editor was so limited?
As the 3-PLUS-1 run from ROM (despite it is 32KB), the text could be (should be) much much more in the available RAM.
99 lines, and 80 characters per line is only 8KB, even if you have a formatting (one extra byte per character) you are still only at 16KB.
At least 50KB RAM should have been available next to the ROM!
Several ppl highlights it was a fantastic idea to have it in the ROM and start it at a button press (it was), I feel some huge limitations built into the SW, like this 99 lines.
This is not the limitation of the machine, it is the limitation of the SW and the concept, and NOT because it had to fit into 32KB ROM.
Actually in the ROM the SW takes no spece from the data/test/cells, like a SW need to be loaded
It you could write small novels in the built-in machine (300-400 lines) noone would complain.
I am not a great programmer, but BASIC continuously DOES RAM/ROM switching, so provides 60KB free RAM. It could have been done by the built in SW too.
(the previously mentioned Botticelli is a great example. It runs in GFX mode (-10KB), has a second GFX screen (-10KB), has a nice GUI, software sprite, a lot of built in textures and tools.
EasyScript for C64 (1982!) should have been loaded into the memory (RAM), and still offered more area of editing, full of features, even can link files.
It should have been known in 1983 or 1984, that this level should be reached.
Yes, it cost 75USD back in the time, but such a packagake in the ROM (32KB should have been enough, Easyscript was 13KB only on C64) would not make anyone complain. ("Easy Script is one of the most powerful word processors available for any microcomputer.")
BTW Update: If you check out Cool News 4, it uses a soft-80 column mode. Very well readible even with CRT emulation and resterlines (sorry, no chance to check it out on real CRT TV), and the speed is really correct. I saw on C64 there were several hardware 80 column cards, some of them are really hard to read. This Cool News 4 soft 80 column looks neat...
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