recompiling Colossal Cave - nealcrook/multicomp6809 GitHub Wiki
My "prebuilt" set of FLEX disk images includes one that contains the source files for Colossal Cave adventure, written in C. Recompiling this from source is a usefully compute-intensive and I/O-intensive activity and so can be used as a convenient benchmark.
Colossal cave should be on disk 1. Build (recompile) and run it like this (the text starting "--" is a comment - don't type it!)
+++ dir 1 -- should see disk adventure with sources etc,
+++ type 1.makeadv.txt -- should see list of LCC commands to do the compile/link
+++ asn w=1 -- use drive 1 as work drive
+++ exec makeadv.txt -- see drive light flicker. The compiler prints CR
-- every 5s or so. Takes a couple of minutes to complete
+++ dir advent.* -- should see advent.cmd with the current system date
+++ 1.advent -- should start up
If you reboot and try to run it:
+++ 1.advent -- get fatal error 40: it cannot find the data files
Instead, you need to do this:
+++ asn w=1
+++ 1.advent
Benchmarks
On a system with the default clocking setup (50MHz, 5-cycle VMA=1 access, 4-cycle VMA=0 access: i.e., 6809 running at a nominal 10MHz), I timed the compilation at 3min 1sec.
On a system with high-speed RAMs, a 90MHz (PLL-derived) clock and fixed 2-cycle access (i.e., 6809 running at 45MHz), the compilation time was reported to be 1min 50sec.