Like a fake Z instruction or pattern (like a serial number of 999999 for Ozmoo maybe?) that can measure ticks / jiffies / milliseconds / whatever?
Obviously only interesting on older interpreters.
Here’s a story that finds all the prime numbers below 256. Could handle more than 256 but would really be better as a Z5 story since those implement bit shifts.
Yeah, I guess that would be best. It’s going to count a lot of time in your screen display routines but… why not, that’s pretty much what text adventures do all day and you care about its speed.
But I meant more like a standard way to signal to an interpreter you’d like to measure how long a certain following code sequence (Sieve, Adventure, Zork I) takes to execute.
This may not be exactly what you asked for, but Ozmoo can be made to write the two lowest bytes of the jiffy clock into the Z-machine header every instruction.
On line 98 in make.rb, uncommment this line:
# 'TIMING', # Store the lowest word of the jiffy clock in 0-->2 in the Z-code header
A jiffy is 1/60s on C64.
I use this to evaulate the performance of code in PunyInform.
There are walkthroughs for PunyInform Adventure and Inform 6 Adventure in the Ozmoo distribution.
If you build Ozmoo with -bm (i.e.“benchmark”), it will incorporate the walkthrough in the interpreter, rig the PRNG, disable MORE prompts, and it will print the jiffy clock before the first move, as well as after the last move.
Ohh. Zoom added some unofficial opcodes to start and stop a timer. Bocfel also supports them (though the most recent release of Gargoyle dropped support), but they’re otherwise not widely supported so you’d be limited to those interpreters.
