I sometimes wonder what "Turbo Ada" would have looked like, but I think it would have probably looked like later versions of Borland Pascal. Things like generics and exceptions would have taken some of the "turbo" out of the compiler and runtime -- the code generator didn't even get a non-peephole optimizer until 32-bit Delphi, it would have been too slow.
It might be nice to have Ada's tasks driven by DOS interrupts, though. I think GNAT did this.
I have not seen it, but there is something close to what you ask about: Turbo Modula-2 (an implementation of MODULA-2 written by Martin Odersky), as both MODULA-2 and PASCAL were Niklaus Wirth-invented languages that looks very similar to Ada:
"Shortly before we finished our compiler, Borland came out with Turbo Pascal, and they were considering going into the Modula-2 market as well. In fact, Borland decided to buy our Modula-2 compiler to be sold under the name of Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M alongside an IBM PC version they wanted to develop. We offered to do the IBM PC version for them, but they told us they had it already covered. Unfortunately that version took them much longer than planned. By the time it came out, three or four years later, their implementor team had split from the company, and it became known as TopSpeed Modula-2. In the absence of an IBM-PC version, Borland never put any marketing muscle behind Turbo-Modula-2, so it remained rather obscure."
-- https://www.artima.com/articles/the-origins-of-scala
Ada did not took off during the glory MS-DOS/Windows 3.x Borland days exactly because of Turbo Pascal.
Note that the Martin Odersky of Scala fame was one of the main developers of Turbo Modula-2, that Borland killed shortly thereafter. They were also rather quick to get rid of Turbo Basic (which I had quite some fun with).
With Turbo Pascal absorving the Object Pascal ideas from Apple, and some of the key features from Modula-2, there was not much left from Ada 83 that was relevant for MS-DOS programmers.
However nowadays between FreePascal, Delphi, and Ada, I would probably pick Ada, given its industry role, and besides Ada Core, there are actually other six vendors still in business.
I'm guessing Apple had stopped putting board schematics and ROM listings in their reference manuals by the time the ACE came out, or perhaps soon afterwards.
IIRC they also had the first native (100% Java) JDBC driver, so you could run from any platform and without weird JNI locking issues when using threads.
I really prefer the 2D pixel graphics of the original Civ. But the middle game can be a slog due to micromanagement, e.g. loading units onto boats. I would love to see a few tweaks, fixing bugs like disappearing units, and a stronger AI that doesn't have to cheat :)
It's not the wrong design; RISC-V is designed around extensions, and they left room in the instruction encoding for them. They don't have a 800-lb gorilla like Intel shoving the ISA down customers' throats (Canonical is the closet thing) so there is some debate on which combination of extensions are needed for desktop apps.
> They don't have a 800-lb gorilla like Intel shoving the ISA down customers' throats
Nobody really forces you to use x64 if you don't like it, just as nobody forced you to use Itanium — which Intel famously failed to "shove down the customers' throats" btw.
From the docs, I couldn't tell if it had disassembled very much of the EXE. Looks like it extracted most of the assets, the presence of open-source modding tools for this game in training data likely helped a bit.
Realize, though, that just grabbing a frame buffer is not a thing anymore. To render graphics you need GLES support through something like ANGLE, vectors and fonts via Skia, Unicode, etc. A web browser has those things. Any static binary bundling those things is also gonna be pretty large.
And JavaScript is very good at backwards compatibility when you remove the churn of frameworks (unfortunately Electron doesn't guarantee compatibility quite as far back)
It might be nice to have Ada's tasks driven by DOS interrupts, though. I think GNAT did this.
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