My OperaBroken Donut: Pouring through code after a couple of cold boys
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 11:25:01 PM
Man, there is nothing like pouring through someone else's code after a couple of cold beers.
Things you never noticed come to light and other people's ingenuity is revealed.
I have some ultra-efficient Mandelbrot Set code in Machine assembly language that I'm going
over this evening...enlightening. It utilizes the 8087 Floating Point chip on that machine!
For a more thorough technical discussion click here
The math coprocessor was a way to streamline floating point calculations on a (mostly) integer
machine. If you ever used Apple BASIC on the old machines: Think Integer BASIC, no FP.
Anyway, the code essentially goes pixel by pixel calculating the necessary Mandelbrot math
and plots a color accordingly. Nice. No more Gee-whiz here... It's all in black & white.
I even managed to coerce the code into giving colored dots instead of grayscale. It's code
that came with a Flat-File Assembler I downloaded off the 'net. Pass me another cold one...
Things you never noticed come to light and other people's ingenuity is revealed.
I have some ultra-efficient Mandelbrot Set code in Machine assembly language that I'm going
over this evening...enlightening. It utilizes the 8087 Floating Point chip on that machine!
For a more thorough technical discussion click here
The math coprocessor was a way to streamline floating point calculations on a (mostly) integer
machine. If you ever used Apple BASIC on the old machines: Think Integer BASIC, no FP.
Anyway, the code essentially goes pixel by pixel calculating the necessary Mandelbrot math
and plots a color accordingly. Nice. No more Gee-whiz here... It's all in black & white.
I even managed to coerce the code into giving colored dots instead of grayscale. It's code
that came with a Flat-File Assembler I downloaded off the 'net. Pass me another cold one...
