Scott Robison

I thought ET was that bad. Not a fan. I loved the port of Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator, Frogger, Missile Command, Space Invaders, Asteroids...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/mars-probe-gets-windows-98-update seems a better source. Sorry for the misleading previous article.

Some one corrected the article elsewhere, stating the probe is running an RTOS, and that Windows 98 was just used during development. Which makes more sense to me, though I've not confirmed that either. I just took the article at face value.

Edit: see correction below. I find it interesting that a Mars probe is running Windows 98. https://www.techradar.com/news/mars-probe-running-windows-98-receives-software-update-after-two-decades

Another issue to consider is how much effort to expend. Yes, you want it accurate, but it's a fool's errand to spend months optimizing code to save a few seconds per year. Mind you, I've been that fool before, but when it comes to commercial code, you have to weigh the cost of the development, testing, maintenance, etc against the use case. We want our operating systems to be efficient because we use them all the time. An android app for 2048 isn't nearly as critical. Yes, take pride in your work, but also realize when the effort isn't justified by the return on the investment.

That is a question that a person can only answer for him or her self. Spectrum Next is not for me but X16 is.

Apple IIgs used 65816 because of the high level of backward compatibility it had to the NMOS 6502 used in earlier Apple II models. So I think it is safe to say that as long as you kept it in emulation mode, it could mostly use the same kernal and other software. But to fully take advantage of it would require changes to the system.

Simple supply and demand. There are not enough hobbyists to make it worth anyone's time or effort.

There is a separation, but many / most ML programs include a BASIC stub to run the ML after loading it. And some programs are written in BASIC. And some ML programs will use routines in the BASIC ROM. Any of those programs would not work in a COMAL or Forth only environment.

And for people who might not know or remember, the idea of files having fixed length records that you could seek to was very common in systems prior to the 1980s. CP/M basically treated files as a number of 128 byte records (the size of a sector usually). The idea that you could seek to an arbitrary byte offset in any old file was pretty radical when it was introduced. Given that much of the world ran off 9 track magnetic tape, the record abstraction was convenient for batch processing. Today we take for granted that we can seek around in a file and read it back in a random order. Such has not always been the case.

Because it is what the team creating the X16 wanted. There are many things that could be called "wrong" in any given project, not the least of which is using a 40 year old (give or take) CPU. But the people creating it have a vision for it. When I create a machine I get to make the decisions. When you create a machine you get to make the decisions. In the meantime, we have the ability to use other software that isn't included in the machine if we want.

Because the ancient BASiC feels authentically like a Commodore 8 bit computer. Those who want COMAL are of course free to use it.

BASIC 2 involves far less bank switching than BASIC 7 would require. Between the screen editor, BASIC 7, and the kernal, 40 KB of ROM is consumed which would mean many context switches from one ROM bank to another. BASIC alone is 28K.

Correct. Much as with the MMU on the C128, the CPU only ever has a 64K window into memory, so you have to get creative with banking. One exception being that there is a address mode for extended instructions to access anything in the 28 bit address space, but that's really only useful for register manipulation as PC is still a 16 bit register.

While I will not disagree that sentimental reasons definitely came into play for selecting 65C02, it does offer certain advantages to Z80, namely its external data bus access is simpler than Z80. 65C02 generally accesses a byte per cycle, whereas Z80 requires multiple cycles per memory access.