[Coco] Lonnie Falk once defended the Coco once by saying "It neverslows down" - but the SNES actually speeds up

[gene heskett]

On 3/15/25 08:33, John Guin via Coco wrote:
> Near the end of the Coco heyday, Lonnie had an editorial that was trying to make the point that, unlike perhaps a car, the Coco does not slowly degrade.  It just keeps going at the same speed as when it was made (and IIRC he mentioned that most of the time it was in use was technically spent waiting on user input).
>
> But could it go faster over time?  Apparently, the Super Nintendo actually does speed up a bit the older it gets https://www.404media.co/super-nintendo-hardware-is-running-faster-as-it-ages/ (needs an account to read - sorry).  And here https://bsky.app/profile/tas.bot/post/3lj47u3fga22n
>
> So I wonder if the clock in the older Cocos has altered in speed over the last 40+ years, or if some other component might fall into this bucket.  I do not have an oscilloscope myself to check, nor do I have a baseline from my Cocos that far back, but it might be an interesting avenue of exploration for someone with that gear.
>
> Cheers!

The coco's got markedly faster with running os9 as we found and fixed 
bugs. I didn't use basic enough ( too clunky ) to note, but generally 
that pretty much stayed the same.  Running os9 level one there was very 
little to limit what it could do, I wrote an edisk for a gvg300 3A/B 
video switcher that was 4 times faster than gvg's $20,000 kit. And later 
used much of that code for a signature analyzer for that extremely 
complex switcher to tell me which of the 24 digital paths thru it had a 
bad memory chip. All been retired now by the switch to digital video in 
2008.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

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