John H. Guillory  wrote:
>  CG> >> limitations, the 8051 and 6303 being the worst in
>  CG> >> my experience!
>  CG> Worse than 8086/8?  Must have been bad...
>      If it's anything like the 6502, no DIV instrunction or MUL instruction,
>    I can't for the life of me figure out how in the world I ever wrote
>    assembly language programs on the commodore!  Yet, for some reason I was
>    able to write my own interrupt vector request routine that allowed me to
>    have 3-4 split borders and background colors on the screen at the same
>    time.
>
> John H. Guillory

Easy—it was a tiny, inexpensive chip and you could have any kind of
multiply or divide you needed just by writing a couple dozen instruction
subroutine.

More is more, not necessarily better.

Now if you have an application that does enough multiplies and/or divides
that the performance cost is greater than the silicon cost, a
firmware/hardware multiply and divide might make sense, but many
applications can be designed to minimize the frequency of
multiplies/divides.

--
-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II:  http://michaeljmahon.com

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