[Coco] CoCo2, a speed demon?

[Robert Emery]

--- Diego Barizo <diegoba at adinet.com.uy> wrote:
> After reading a few times in different websites that the CoCo was a slow 
> computer (I guess ppl is used to MHz=Speed), I decided to do some 
> benchmarking.
<snip>
> But my surprise came today, while testing a CoCo 2. Un-POKEd, it is a 
> lot faster than the 3. When POKEd, they come about even....
> I found this on my POKEs list. Could this be the cause?
> 
> POKE &HA1C1,&H39:FOR F=&HA1CA to &HA1C1
> STEP -1:READA:POKE F,A:NEXT F:DATA 121,39,
> 72,67,0,255,182,2,255,127
> put as the first line of your program
> it will speed up your computer by about
> 15%!! It patches the keyboard scan routine

Diego, when developing Color FOG I tested that routine and was not very
impressed with the resulting speedup. Next I tried POKE&HADEB,57 and was
pleasantly surprised by the noticeably smoother mouse action... my test of what
worked or didn't.

That poke also prevents Basic from polling for Break and Shift+@ constantly,
but ON BRK GOTO still works. This means in Basic you have to plan for a way to
exit your program (or hit reset), which I see as an added bonus.

I'd like to see how that poke affects your benchmark on the CoCo3, with and
without the high-speed poke. I doubt it would work on the CoCo2 since it has a
different Rom version.

Bob

> 
> FOR to 10000 A+1 to 5000 ? “A”*1000 Goto next 5000 Gosub IF/THEN
> Model III 27 38 24 21 29 36
> Model 100 32 39 50 20 24 36
> CoCo2 15 24 10 11 15 40
> CoCo2 Poke 11 18 7 8 11 30
> CoCo3 22 31 31 19 26 47
> CoCo3 Poke 11 16 15 9 13 24
> Atari 800XL 24 26 20 20 25 22
> Tandy 1100 7 10 21 5 7 10
> 
> 
> 
> --
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> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
> 


		
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