>It makes you wonder how they did it in the Cinematronics Space Wars version
>of
>the game?
>
>The C-CPU could do a 12x12 bit multiply in 24 (5mhz) clock cycles (or
>4.8us).
>
>It was also scalable, for instance it could do a 8x8 bit multiply in 16
>cycles
>(or 3.2us).
The Cinematronics math performance was actually pretty amazing in it's day.
(Hell, it's pretty good *now*! If that clock was scaled up to today's
50+MHz speeds you could run a soft-modem on the thing!)
Nintendo even added a multiplier to the SNES hardware which really helped
out a lot for some things. (I think it'd do an 8x8 in 12 clocks at fastrom
speeds -- about 3.57MHz.) Having the hardware to help you does encourage
lazyness though, awful easy just to go the brute-force approach to things...
But, easy is OK if it helps get some more games out there, IMHO. ;-)
-Clay
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