Re: AE Fastmath

[gudat@avalon.physik.unizh.ch (gudat henrik)]

In article <9211072123.AA08918@gc3.gac.peachnet.edu> flowney@GC3.GAC.PEACHNET.EDU (Frank Lowney) writes:
>I have an AE fastmath card that served quite well to speed up a statistics
>program written in Applesoft BASIC (AppStats).  This was accomplished by a
>set of Ampersand commands that AE developed and shipped with the product. 
>I'd like to extend the functionality of this math coprocessor to other,
>newer areas of my computing activities like HyperCard GS, AppleWorks 3.0
>and AppleWorks GS (the spreadsheets particularly).
>

Just forget it. The AE FastMath is the worst coproc card I've ever seen.

The "math" chip is so stupid and slow that it would slow down most math
operations significantly.

The problem is that the FM chip has only 48 bit resultion, and the SANE
software always calculates with 80 bits. You'd have to convert values
from one format to another and spend more time on converting and loading
the chip's registers than doing it without FM.

For AppleSoft it's fine because these rouztines are 8 bit (and thus a
bit slower than 16 bit code) and have exactly the same precision.

henrik

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