3 ms·
> I don't think any of the popular 8-bit machines did. The Commodores had timers in their 6522/6526 chips, where an RTC was set up. In Basic, it could be acces
by Max-q 7y ago
> I don't think any of the popular 8-bit machines did.
The Commodores had timers in their 6522/6526 chips, where an RTC was set up. In Basic, it could be accessed via the TI or TI$ variables (integer and string respectively). Not having timers or VBlank interrupts were unusual. The Apple ][ was an early and hacked-together design by Woz, not at all made for a mass market. Just look at the graphic formats :-/
- classichasclass 7y agoNot quite. TI$ on the C64 was maintained by the 60Hz Timer A interrupt (in fact, remarkably similar to this method, but using IRQ instead of NMI and built into BASIC). You are correct that the CIAs have Time-of-Day clocks, but BASIC doesn't leverage those. However, some apps like GEOS do.