24 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
24 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
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AST RESEARCH TECHNICAL BULLETIN TB-0028 7-13-84
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BASIC'S AVAILABLE MEMORY DISCREPANCY
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When using the IBM PC BASIC Interpreter, at initialization, it
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displays the version, release, and copyright information. In
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addition it displays the amount of memory available to the user
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and their program. It is displayed as 'xxxxx Bytes free', where
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xxxxx is a decimal value from 0 to 65536. BASIC is limited to
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64kb regardless of total memory in system.
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After installing an AST board with one or more serial
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(asynchronous) port(s), one may notice that available memory has
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changed. The reason being that when invoking Disk or Advanced
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BASIC, BASIC determines if there are serial ports in the system;
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and if so keeps an internal driver resident for each port found.
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This means less available memory to the user. This driver is 436
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bytes in length.
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This data was gathered from tests using Disk and Advanced BASIC,
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of releases 1.10, 2.00, 2.10. Be aware that the Disk BASIC is the
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BASIC.COM and Advanced BASIC is the BASICA.COM on your DOS disk.
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