[Coco] Am9511 Arithmetic Processing Unit Cartridge Pak for the Color Computer

[Don Barber]

Hi folks! I made another thing! You may remember my past crazy projects 
such as CoCo RSA and the CoCo USB Serial Cartridge Pak.

My latest project:  I designed a CoCo cartridge pak for interfacing the 
AMD 9511 Arithmetic Processor Unit. When software is designed or patched 
to use it, it can speed up arithmetic operations like MUL, DIV, SIN, 
COS, TAN, ASIN, ACOS, ATAN, EXP, PWR, SQRT, LN, and supporting functions 
(such as fixed to float conversions) significantly. Programs written in 
machine language or compiled can see significant (50-70x theoretically) 
performance gains by using the pak, especially if the parallelism the 
chip enables is exploited.

I've also made a patch for Color Computer 3 Basic to use this cartridge 
pak. Benchmarks show a 10x improvement for floating-point heavy programs 
compared to the stock Basic routines.

I've released both open source; the hardware gerber files and the Basic 
patch are available at https://github.com/barberd/coco9511pak.

This hardware design was difficult due to the complex timing 
requirements of the Am9511 (it was designed to be used with the 8080); 
please see the README on the github site for more details.

Thanks,

Don