[Coco] Games that don't fit on floppies (was Super IDE vs. Drive Pak)

[gene heskett]

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 04:17:19 PM John W. Linville did opine:


> On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 01:06:49PM +0000, Mark Marlette wrote:

> > John Linville could speak to this more as his video player is based

> > upon the critical bandwidth of the player on the S-IDE.

> 

> Actually, I think it is the CPU bandwidth that is the real bottleneck

> for the video player.  Obviously it needs a mass storage device as

> fast or faster than the CPU accesses to keep-up.

> 

Which virtually any rotating mass storage can easily do.  The coco, with a 
6309 in it, using the ldq,stq commands, takes 11 seconds to move a 
megabyte.  Period.  The source or target makes at worst a minuscule 
difference in the test results.

I have no clue, and don't recall the test results when these two SCSI 
drives were installed in my Amiga, but considering the speed of the Zorro 
bus is 7 MHz, and the interface is 8 bits wide, it is extremely obvious 
that these disks are so much faster than the coco that disk speed in and of 
itself is not a consideration and does not enter into the loading time of a 
game.


> The coco3 video player would not exist without some fast way to get

> data into the coco3.  Even pre-loading memory is not really an option,

> although you might squeeze a few seconds of play time out of it.

> 

> As for the larger question in this thread, I think it is really a

> judgment call.  If you were to produce something that amounted to a

> fairly modern PC or some collection of AVR or ARM or whatever kind

> of boards and it just happened to have a coco as a front-end to it,

> your project would probably not be too interesting to me (at least not

> as a coconut).  OTOH, if you add just enough modern technology to your

> project to enable the coco to show it's stuff (e.g. by preprocessing

> some data or providing more storage) then I don't see the problem.

> 

> John


I'll generally agree with this John, however I think I might add one of the 
cocoFPGA gizmo's as acceptable.

Cheers, Gene
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