#: 9220 S10/OS9/6809 (CoCo)
    21-Jan-91  04:44:36
Sb: #9206-Eliminator RTC
Fm: LARRY OLSON 72227,3467
To: james pottage 71750,2012 (X)

James,
     Put your tools and testers away , there is nothing wrong with the
hardware. The speedup you see in pacos9 is all software related. Kevin was
right about part of what you are noticeing, with the new GRFDRV installed the
ghosts will sometimes line up on a byte boundry which makes the gets/puts
faster, this is part of the speed increase. The other part of the speed
increase you see is if pacman is not moving, when pacman is stopped, the
processing time that would be devoted to moving pacman is now available for the
ghosts, which causes them to speed up.
   If Bruce Isted's VRN was available at the time, it could have been used to
fix that problem by setting the program up to move the objects under control of
interrupts.
   I had some code in the program that would waste the processing time that
pacman wasn't using, so that the ghosts didn't speed up noticeably, but I took
it out. It seemed terrible to be throwing away processing time and anyway the
more I thought about it, I thought that the speedup of the ghosts when pacman
stops might add a little more of a challenge to the game.
  So James....Do Not Attempt To Adjust Your Set
           We Are Controlling What You See....

Larry (guilty party) Olson