Re: Sudoku puzzle solver for Apple II

["BLuRry" <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> BLuRry wrote:
> >>BTW, animating this screen in HGR or DHR would have big speed effects!
> >
> >
> > Yeah, I know.  I remember some of the good ol' softdisk programs being
> > a big sluggish.  But if optimized (e.g. only update the characters that
> > have actually changed) it wouldn't be all that unbearable.
>
> No, it would still be unbearable.
>
> 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.

-B