2 Oct
2007
2 Oct
'07
12:18 p.m.
On 02/10/2007, Allison <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net> wrote:
The 9900 chips is not crippled, for 1976 three voltage
NMOS its about as fast
as the technology of the time could go. The TI99/4 did however do a nasty to
it. One is they muxed the bus down to 8bits wide and that does slow the system
some. There were 128 words of ram (6810s) that if you execute there the speed
is noticeable. The other is the GROM (sort of an interpreted language with a
register point to next instruction) is a bottleneck as well. There was a
later 9980 and the 9985 which were a 8bit bus interface and were somewhat
crippled but I'd never seen one in a TI99/4A.
That's probably true, but the 99/4a wasn't a 1976 machine. It was
released in 1981 and withdrawn 1983. A bit unfairly for a tweaked 1979
machine (the 99/a), the 99/4a's competition was mainly 1982 machines
like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum, which (based on my
possibly erroneous recollection) outperformed the 99/4a significantly.
--
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