		WORLD PREMIERE OF CMD'S SUPER64CPU


On Saturday, the 4th of May 1996, CMD introduced their newest product,
the Super64CPU, to the public at a local GEOS meeting in Vienna/Austria.

The Super64CPU has a W65C816S processor with an official clock speed
of 20 MHz, inofficially it is supposed to be even a bit higher. The
unit I was able to test, was still a beta version prototype. According
to CMD in two weeks time (mid of May) the CPU will go into full
production (a lot of orders have been already placed), the Super128CPU
will follow in mid August (this CPU will be even a bit faster than the
C64 version).

CMD's Super64CPU comes in a metal case (similar in color and style to
RamLink, but much less dimension in width but therefore higher) and
has a pass through port to add other cartridges such as Final
Cartridge III, Commodore REUs or of course CMD's RamLink. There are
three switches on the upper side, plus a turbo LED and an additional
Reset button. From left to right the first switch enables/disables this
device, the second switch turns Jiffy DOS on or off and the third
switch is used to toggle between normal and turbo mode (1 or 20 MHz).

This prototype didn't have a finished SuperCPU-DOS included and was
therefore not able to work together with RamLink, this should be fixed
in the latest version of the DOS which will be included in the units
which will go into production in two weeks time. The Jiffy DOS button
was in this beta version not connected to the electronic circuit so it
was not possible to switch Jiffy DOS off, which caused some troubles
with programms, that insisted on there own loading routine. In the
release versions to follow, this bug will also be fixed.

Sad news for a lot of scene dudes: The Super64CPU doesn't like the
Action Replay MK VI Cartridge. The only way to make the Action Replay
work was to totally disable the SuperCPU. The Final Cartridge III
however did work together with the SuperCPU. So it is not possible to
use the features such as freezer or monitors of the Action Replay, but
it does work with the FC III.

Some games did benefit from the higher speed the CPU provides, amongst
them were games like Test Drive. This game plays with 20 MHz nearly as
smooth as an arcade game, well the graphics are looking a bit clumsy
if you compare it to an arcade, but the the scrolling is much more
smooth, you can drive very precisely now, it plays like a different
game, very similar to an arcade game.

F16 Combat Pilot or Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer now really
look like flight simulators, the speed gives you now really the
feeling of flying.

Games like Outrun Europe or Powerdrift did benefit a little, the
difference wasn't really very big though.

Other games like Stunt Car Racer or Revs are really amazing to watch,
it is so incredible fast, but they are unplayable because they are way
too fast in 20 MHz mode.

Elite shows you real vector power, sometimes the games looks too fast,
in other cases it is really fun to play, if you switch the CPU down to
1 MHz you suddenly feel that you are dealing with a snail, the
performance difference is really that big. It is quite similar to a
car driven with 130 kph for a couple of hours. If you have to brake
down to 50 kph it seems to be like if you are walking by foot. The
feeling is quite the same.

I have tested also tools and utilities. A 110 block file was being
crunched using the Cruelcruncher. Without CPU it is supposed to take
from 15-30 minutes, with CPU the thing was finished in about one
minute and a half. Decrunching is that fast, that you don't even
notice it. If packers are using illegal opcodes, it causes the CPU to
crash, but that's understandable.

GoDot!, the C64 image processor, needs only one to two seconds to
render, while in normal C64 mode it takes about 35 seconds. Amica
Paint flies and so does GEOS:

In the shipped version there will be a disk with GEOS patches since it
is necessary to patch the floppy drivers. These patches weren't
available for me at this day, so all I could do was to switch it down
to 1 MHz and start geoPaint and geoWrite, and as soon as there was no
more disk access I could switch to 20 MHz and the result was more than
amazing!

In geoPaint the fill routines are now flying, filled circles are now
moving as fast as your mouse pointer. In geoWrite the improvements are
even better, they are in fact dramatic: First of all, everytime you
type a letter, it appears as fast on the screen as you are used to
being it done in BASIC V2, so no more 'typing faster than the computer
can handle it'. Left-right paging is now done instantly, you nearly
aren't recognizing the redrawing of the missing text parts. It is so
fast as you would expect a PowerPC or a Pentium 120 or higher behave
on a similar program. Even better is the scroll up and down function
(moving the mouse pointer up or down out of the screen): While in 1
MHz mode, down scrolling is slow and up scrolling is even slower (you
have to wait several seconds till it is done), with 20 MHz it is
similar fast a very fast PC when clicking on the scroll arrows of a
window. It was really astonishing, it was even more than I
expected. Up and down scrolling as fast as the cursors moves!

Alignments (left, center, right, full) are as fast as you can click on
the corresponding button, it is incredible!

The preview mode of the test page I made took in standard mode 1
minute and 7 seconds to be drawn, with the CPU it was faster than 6.5
seconds...

Unfortunately I didn't have the chance to test such as applications as
GeoPublish, GeoMorph however is now that fast, that it is now some
kind of realtime morphing (some seconds for one frame). 

Last but not least I want to mention some demos I have tried: Attack
of Stubidos 3 had a mandelbrot zoomer which was that fast in 20 MHz
mode, that it was finished in some seconds while the music was still
playing in the beginning phase, as it was initially adjusted to fit to
the zoom in 1 MHz.

Vector Demos (e.g. the burning rubber part of a Bonzai demo) were
amazing to watch, they looked way smoother and therefore really Amiga
like. FLI of course doesn't work as it is timed for 1 MHz, but all
texture mapping (Dawnfall/Oxyron) are now looking fast and smooth.

Mr.Sid tried to code some rastersplits on the unit. He achieved 32
splits with only about 20 lines of assembler code without using the
IRQ. He meant that it should be even possible to do 2 splits in BASIC.

Musics which use about $12 rasterlines per frame in standard mode are
now using 1-2 rasterlines in turbo mode.

All these things were tested in the emulation mode of the CPU. The
real potential of course can only be seen in the native mode of the
CPU (there you have to possibility to address up to 16 MB).

This CPU comes with a Rocket Socket, which is able to hold an
additional RamCard, which can hold up to 16 MB. In the basic version
the RamCard is not included, you only have 128 K of fast static RAM,
64 K of it is free usable.

More information will be posted in about two days by Mr.Sid (Andreas
Varga). For questions feel free to drop me a mail, I will be glad to
help you:

spockie@giga.or.at


Cheers
Guenther

