Re: Space Wars Demo

On Mon, 1 Nov 1999 14:41:54 -0800 , you wrote:

>You know...
>
>The talk of gravity calculation and the cartridge-based Space Duel made me
>think... We could always stick another processor on the cartridge for a
>game-- just map it as R/W memory. (A little 50Mhz Scenix chip with some
>dual-port RAM would probably make a pretty good/cheap "mathbox". ...and
>would be good "copy protection" for commercial games to boot.) Probably not
>worth the extra effort required, but thought I'd mention it. :-)

<RANT>

Just don't use that total pile of crap Microchip tries to pass off as
an integer math package (AN617)! That's got to be the worst divide
routine ever coded! I have no idea what they were trying to do,
following the uncommented code is near impossible, but their claim for
a 32 by 16 bit divide is:

   Max Timing: 699 clks
   Min Timing: 663 clks

   Program Memory: 240 (!!)
   Data Memory: 9

240 words of programming! Geeze!!!! That's 1/4 of the memory of a
16c84! Add the multiply routine and your all ready half out of
memory!!!

For the record, if anyone is interested I have a 32 by 16 bit unsigned
divide routine that spec'd at:

   Max Timing = 393
   Min Timing = 274

   Program memory: 24
   Data memory: 7

And a 16 by 16 multiply:

   Max clock = 247
   Min clock = 167

   Program memory: 22
   Data memory: 7

Both written for the 16c84, almost from the top of my head. I've
written *a lot* of simple integer math routines for microcontrollers,
the standard algorithm is jokingly simple. (I'll email them to anyone
interested.)

240 words??? What was that guy thinking!!!

</RANT>

Sorry. I'm better now. That's been bugging me for a long time and
when I tried venting here at work all I got was blank stares and a
"what the hell are you talking about look?". A bunch of friggin
twenty something Visual C++ programmers! Does anybody even remember
that buried under all those GUI's and Multimedia there's a processor
that only understand binary coded information???? Geeze!!!

<//RANT>

Sorry, I did it again...

-Zonn
Received on Mon Nov 1 17:37:12 1999