The project was started on the evening of 10/1/98 during exam week. Due to the need to write an assembler first, before debugging could begin I was delayed a little. As a result of my assembly programming for the emulator being pretty dire at times, I called on Mohsen Alshayef to fix the bugs and sort out my structure at a very early stage, to whom I'm very grateful.
At approximately 1.05am on 22/1/98 Babe took about 15 seconds to correctly executed the Highest Common Factor program, on about the 3rd attempt, after I realised that I had forgotten to reverse a number in the LDN function.
I added some graphics, rewrote the display routine to make it 5 times faster (no need to CLS after every loop :o), improved the versatility no end, corrected some minor technical points of emulation, stuck a front end on it, combined it with the assembler and released it.
2/2/98
v0.02
Added screendump ability, just press S to save the screen to any named point in the file. Added assembler log file generator, to enable debugging of assembler errors from incorrect assembly language.
Added a real time disassembler for the Present instruction and all store lines, so that the user can see quickly what instruction is where, and need not bother with trying to decode the bits in their head!
Note, the program is currently *highly* UNoptimised, I may get round to optimising the code at a later date, as I believe with a few hours work, I could easily double if not treble the speed - it's that badly written :o)
Unfortunately the naff colours and cocked up system font are not yet fixed, does anyone have any idea what could be causing them, and better, how to get rid of them!
6/2/98
v0.03
James Miller took a look at the program and spotted a bug in the STO function where I'd forgot to reverse the bit order for the numeric display. He also suggested a fix for the trailing digits problem, which has been implemented.
I released the full source code for reference only with this version.
27/3/98
v0.04
James Miller pointed out where I had blatantly gone wrong returning to the desktop, so the original problems with cocked up palette in 16 colour modes etc. are now fixed.
