[Coco] Kicking the Z-80 butts...

[Joe Grubbs]

Quick story... Back when I was a kid my dad and I got into this non-serious "competition" as to which of our computers was faster--my CoCo2 or his Model 16. We set up a completely non-scientific test, but it was a fun programming exercise. 

We wrote programs that would perform a bunch of recursive arithmetic, and we timed how long each machine took to finish. I wrote mine in BASIC of course. My dad wrote his in C under TRS-XENIX running on the 6MHz 68000. Of course he won that round, but he admitted it wasn't fair, so he booted the computer with TRS-DOS in Z80 Model II mode and wrote a similar program in BASIC. My CoCo2 was victorious that time around! 0.895 MHz 6809 vs 4MHz Z80. Yeah yeah there are a myriad of variables that undoubtedly affected the outcome, but remember this was a light hearted father/son experiment.




> Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 09:24:31 -0400
> From: retrocanada76 at gmail.com
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Subject: [Coco] Kicking the Z-80 butts...
> 
> That's why MC6809 is the king of 8-bit processors:
> 
> https://youtu.be/Ysn7Na60ZGA
> 
> Who needs a Z-80 anyway ??? You can have 4, 5 or more on MC6809 @ 2Mhz!
> 
> I have optimized even more my cp/m emulator and now you get wordstar
> running at an acceptable speed.
> 
> enjoy the video
> 
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