[Coco] CoCo Video Player

[John Kent]

The advantage of FPGAs (hardware) is that you can do allot of things in 
parallel. You can be incrementing a counter at the same time as you are 
reading memory and so on. Software is more flexible, but on the CoCo at 
least it is inherently sequential so the more complex the software, the 
slower it becomes.

Hardware is good for accelerating low level functions. When you profile 
software you get the biggest speed up by optimizing operations in the 
inner most loop of nested loops because it's those operations that are 
performed the most frequently. You can speed up low level operations 
that are simple to perform with hardware, but the sophistication of 
higher level functions means they are better done in software.

John.


On 18/03/2011 4:33 AM, Nick Marentes wrote:
> I have to agre with Mark on this one.
>
> > Being a hardware guy, the hardware sets the pace for the software. 
> Software
> > can be good or bad but if the hardware does not support the cool 
> features
> >  which the software is pushing, then NONE of it would be possible. 
> Another
> > way to look at it is that the software can only make the hardware 
> goes as fast
> > as it was designed in a optimized environment. If it was up to the 
> software,
> > the CoCo would be running at 100GHZ today...... :)
>
> You can do a lot in software but the hardware provides the means.
>
> For example, the video project is quite amazing what it is doing on 
> the hardware the CoCo provides but as Steve implies, it's not 
> something I would want to watch a movie from.
>
> Now, if there was some hardware acceleration inluded by an add-on, 
> such as a harware decoder or a 256 color mode... then software can be 
> written to take advantage of the new capabilties and improved video 
> output could be achieved.
>
> As I said, impressive software, but you can only do so much in software.
>
> Nick
>
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