Math on small processors

A while back, when someone was working on Space War for Space Duel hardware
(and how IS that project ?) the discussion came up of implementing some math
functions on the older CPUs. I believe this was for collision detection, so
I think what was sought was a good square root algorithm.

If someone is still working in this, you should pick up the book "Math
Toolkit for Real-Time Programming" by Jack Crenshaw. He dedicates about 40
pages to various square root algorithms, including one that uses only shifts
and subtraction. Another whole 30 page chapter is about sines.

Real-time systems include programming for small microcontrollers, so these
algorithms are targeted to machines without fast multiply/divide
instructions.

If you like math, it's a very interesting book on it's own. The square root
method he uses was inspired from a method used on Friden electromechanical
calculators at NASA (where he worked).

==========================================================
Chris Candreva -- chris@westnet.com -- (914) 967-7816
WestNet Internet Services of Westchester
http://www.westnet.com/
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Received on Mon Mar 31 18:00:17 2003