[Coco] Invent a new way to calculate Pi

[Richard Goedeken]

I would appreciate additional data points; I will add them to the list.  I 
still have a number of systems to test myself.

The AM9511 accelerator is on a ROM PAK board that Don Barber designed and 
offered here on this list. There was some discussion about it in March and 
April of this year.  It does perform floating point math much faster than the 
software implementation in the Coco ROM, but parsing and other non-math 
processing take up most of the execution time in the BASIC benchmark, so while 
it does speed up the Pi calculation, only by about 10-15%.

It would be nice to have a Mandelbrot fractal rendering program for the Coco 
written in assembly and using the AM9511 for the calculation.

Richard

On 9/18/23 19:57, RETRO Innovations via Coco wrote:
> On 9/18/2023 9:11 PM, Richard Goedeken via Coco wrote:
>> I have a little contest that I started a few months ago amongst all my retro 
>> computer friends, to compare the BASIC interpreter speed of all the 
>> different 8-bit computers against each other.  The Coco 3 is one of the 
>> fastest, currently only bested by the Apple IIc accelerated to 4MHz.
>>
>> The algorithm that I'm using to run the benchmark is called SPIGOT and 
>> produces digits of Pi by using only integer math and a memory storage array. 
>> You can find the scorecard in this Google doc:
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zlicfj__PcycbKEbfoiYRijUZh1dqujWPXgh6Um9YO4/edit?usp=sharing
> 
> Are you wanting additional data points?  I think some of us have additional 
> platforms to test, if so. There's also some additional 8 bit accelerators that 
> can be tested, if desired.
> 
> All: Is there a link to additional info on the AM9511 accelerator? It sounds 
> interesting.
> 
> Jim
>