Posted By
JamesC
on 2005-10-18
23:19:39
|  Re: Commodore equations
It is posts like these that I wish I had moderator operations...... I'd kill the **** post so that other wouldn't be subject to the same drivel that I had just read.
Point 1) The majority of us have been using Commodore machines at one time or another for the last 20+ years, and know how to calculate blocks required. It's in the disk drive manual!
Point 2) "In order to find out the number of bytes a program on disk will take up in RAM, use this equation: Blocks Used / 4 = Bytes Used" is not a guaranteed exact calculation. The very last block will most likely not be completely filled with data, but instead contain a few bytes of the actual program (or data file); the remainder will contain whatever was previously in that particular disk drive buffer for the previous disk drive operation. One must look at the track/sector link to find out for sure how many valid program or data bytes are contained in this last sector.
Point 3) Your post has very little to do with the Plus/4 or C16 or C116. The C64 is designed to point back inside the program when strings are defined, whereas the Plus/4 (and its' siblings) and the 128 will copy the string to upper memory. It is only when a string is changed (added to, shortened, or otherwise modified without the new string residing within the program code) that the 64 will move the string's definition to variable memory.
Point 4) Still off the subject of this site, but a 128 program CAN use more than 229 blocks of disk space and still fit within the 128's RAM. If it is a strictly machine code program that is coded to swap between banks 0 and 1 of RAM, or stores code in the optional RAM expansion, then it can easily exceed the 12****+ bytes allowed for BASIC programs. Or, it can be coded to load "modules" as needed..... GEOS is a perfect example of this.
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