Scor­pio News

prompt. Any other key goes straight to an online HELP file that I have provided, summarizing the main features of Z3.

On going to the CCP prompt, the first thing to be noticed is that the prompt includes the DIR: name as well as the DU: – for example A0:BASE>. A few tests with the DU: and DIR: forms confirm the ease of moving around, and cross user/​disk commands like A15:ROOT>DIR P0: show the flexibility. With the various command and associated overlay files in the relevant names directories, it is so useful to be able to type BAS: or PEN: or WS: to access the required area, without having to remember on which DU: I have decided to put things

Type an H, and see the RCP commands displayed, Type a P xxxx, and get a 256 byte Hex and ASCII dump from address xxxx. Try a few POKE commands, and use P to see the result. (Don’t poke the Operating system unless you know what you are doing.)

I use a Winnie with .HLP files in HELP:, and Z3 commands and other utilities in ROOT:. It is very nice to be in say D6:, and be able to type HELP DIRS without moving or worrying where the files are. The path and HELP.COM sorts it all out.

On my system I flip Drives A: and Ramdisk – A: is now my vdisk, I have set up my Winnie as Drives H: and B: (The H: is for Hard). The system logs on to A0:MDSK> on Cold Boot and I normally use MDSK> for work as this greatly speeds any warm boot, and processing is much faster than even a Winnie).

This completes the review of ZCPR3 and its utilities. In the second part I will discuss the installation of the system.

Since carrying out the series of benchmarks which were published in Scorpio News V1 I1 (Jan-Mar. 1987), I have acquired one or two more compilers and interpreters which I’ve cried out on a Genial Multiboard system fitted with the GM888 processor, under CP/M-80 (2.2) and CP/M-86, as appropriate. For purposes of comparison, I ran the same benchmark on an Amstrad PC1512 using MSDOS and DOS Plus – the latter enables one to run CP/M-86 programs.

The results are quite interesting. The benchmark used was obtained from Dr Dobbs Journal in which the idea was to produce a result as near to 2500 as possible, using a range of intrinsic functions available in the interpreter or compiler.

The following language implementations were available:

The Fortran versions were all compiled and the BASICs were all interpreted. The Amstrad uses the 8086 16 bit CPU with a system clock frequency of 8MHz, while the GM888 uses the 8088 8/16 bit CPU at 8MHz with I/O via the 4MHz 80-BUS.

The results were as follows: