TI 990 architecture / was Re: TI-99/4A Floppies

On 3 Oct 2007 at 10:13, Peter C. Wallace wrote: Those benchmarks weren't very comparable! Some had artificial restrictions placed on them because a "move any number of bytes anywhere" sample of code would likely take more than a single page of print. And for many of them, the *size* of the benchmark code wasn't taken into consideration. For example, the Z80 benchmark is really shorter than that of the TMS9900; the 9900 benchmark makes the assumption that the workspace has been "preloaded" with the operands and that a BLWP was used to change context--and that words, not bytes, are to be moved. If the registers used are explicitly loaded and stored, the TMS9900 benchmark would have been much longer. This overly-simple benchmark with varying assumptions is one of the biggest weaknesses of Volume II of the Osborne books. Perhaps a better benchmark might have been searching a character string for a matching substring. But even with its weaknesses, the "Introduction to Microcomputers" set was a valuable resource when there was little software and no MPU was yet dominant. Cheers, Chuck