Innovative Systems FPE...

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

I recently acquired an Innovative Systems (iS) 68881 FPE.

It was clearly designed to accelerate SANE on the IIgs, but it
also came with Appleworks 2.0 patches (for it's SANE routines)
and with a set of macros for direct use with 8-bit Apple II's.

Upon reviewing the macros converted for Merlin, it's apparent
that they were never used or tested, since they have numerous
errors.  They also suffer from the delusion that floating-point
numbers should be represented in little-endian form on the 6502,
which Applesoft contradicts.

Does anyone know how many of these things were made, and if
anyone ever used one successfully with a //e?  My serial number
is 890005, so I'm guessing they weren't very popular.  ;-)

I'm making progress, but feel like completely redesigning
the macros to use a small runtime FPE package.  A further
out possibility is making an interface to Applesoft, since
the 12MHz 68881 clock compensates for the relatively weird
dance one must do with the 6502 to load operands, perform
instructions, and store results.

This might be a more interesting thing to do if there were
more of them in use...

-michael

NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

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