Maximite test ver 2.4A - with EDITING

Author	Message
Geoffg Guru Joined: 06/06/2011 Location: Australia Posts: 3364	Posted: 07:04am 27 Jun 2011         BobDevries said   It takes 5822 mSec to PEEK every location on the screen. We started off with PIXEL() taking a minute or more to process the video screen. Now PEEK() improves it to 6 seconds. But the message is, don't expect anything faster. This is one of the issues of trying to do machine level work with an interpreted BASIC language. BASIC might have a heap of good features but speed is not one of them. If you want speed then you must dust off your C compiler, there is no other way to do it. I expect that this will also be an issue when I try to implement serial, I2C, etc. An interpreted BASIC program will be hard pressed to process data transmitted at high speed and could easily lose data, even with a lot of buffering. There is talk of an Ethernet module communicating over a serial link to MMBasic. Ethernet can receive at up to 70MB/sec, serial might be able to transfer that data at 10KB/sec but MMBasic might be only able to process the data at a fraction of that rate (depending on what is required). The result could be a lot of lost data unless the Ethernet module can do most of the work. The moral is: Don't expect speed from interpreted BASIC, that is not what it is for. Geoff Geoff Graham - http://geoffg.net