The animation that SUDOKU does is not 15fps or 30fps. It's doing
about 525 screen updates per second! And if you skip any of them,
you have to look at all 81 digits, because you don't know which ones
have changed! So anything you hope to make up in the straightaway
you will lose in the curves. ;-)
AH! I see what you mean now -- I didn't realize it was doing screen
updates while searching for the solution. It's a little too fast to
catch that, you see? I think it must have been doing all its
calculations during one VBL cycle. ;-) I was talking more about just
the UI that you interact with to solve the puzzle.
(BTW, an accelerator doesn't help as much as you'd like, since all
the screen stores have to run at 1MHz.)
That and having a large font table would not have enough cache locality
to be very efficient unless you happen to be storing the same character
everywhere. Either way, I wouldn't bet on an accelorator making things
much better -- and also I wouldn't want to expect the average apple //
user to have one.