[Virtualacorn-list] Floating point arithmetic

[Michael Ben-Gershon]

ATimbrell at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 09/10/2008 10:33:23 GMT Daylight Time,  
> ralph_valmai at ntlworld.com writes:
>
>   
>> Lack of hardware for floating point arithmetic has been a problem for  
>> most RISC OS machines for a long time. So can I ask the following  
>> questions?
>>     
>
>   
>> Does VA use the Acorn floating point emulator or  does it use the host 
>> machine's fp unit?
>>     
>  
> VRPC's use the floating point emulator in RISC OS, rather than the
> floating point unit built into the host machines CPU. We did
> investigate a "soft floating point" podule to provide enhanced FPU
> performance - but there is so little RISC OS software that really
> makes use of floating point - so it wasn't considered worthwhile.
>  
I have a very large Fireworkz sheet collection which makes very heavy use of trigonometrical functions. It takes about 5 minutes to recalculate on my Iyonix (it really is very big - about 60 lines and 40 columns). If I were to run it under VRPC if the Iyonix packed up and I was forced to run it under a fast windows desktop machine, better floating point support would be a major advantage (I currently have one licence for VRPC for my laptop machine).

Michael Ben-Gershon
mybg at netvision.net.il