recompiling Colossal Cave

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.