[comp.sys.apple2] IIgs math co-processor wanted

UD182050@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Mike Aos) (09/12/90)

I'm thinking my IIgs could really be accented by one.  Does anyone have any
impressions of the FPE, and AE's card (FastMath?)?  I'm afraid I don't know
much about either.  Address's and costs are also needed, and if anyone has
one of either (right now I'm leaning towards the FPE) that they would like
to part with I'd like to hear from you.  Any relevent information welcome.

gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (09/13/90)

In article <4631UD182050@NDSUVM1> UD182050@NDSUVM1.BITNET (Mike Aos) writes:
>I'm thinking my IIgs could really be accented by one.  ...

I have an FPE and it's very nice -- IF you really have a floating-point
computational bottleneck.  For most IIGS applications it has little
effect.  One nice thing about the FPE is that ORCA/C (and I think ORCA/
Pascal) can be told to generate code that directly accesses the FPE,
instead of going through the SANE tools.  A supplied "INIT" also plugs
the FPE into the SANE toolkit, and there is also an executable module
that can be called at run time from AppleSoft BASIC programs to plug
the FPE in place of AppleSoft's slow (and buggy) floating-point support.
I also found Innovative Systems staff to be helpful when I was having
problems using mine (as it turned out, a TWGS ROM upgrade fixed the
problems, as well as fixing TWGS DMA compatibility problems).

I have no experience with other floating-point accelerators for the IIGS.