Posted By
Litwr
on 2022-02-15
04:39:55
|  Re: A Plus4 rival twin brother?
@mms Thank you. I didn't know these details about cassettes. Indeed the QL had advantages over the plus4. But the plus4 had the more professional external storage. The C1551 was much better than a microdrive. The QL 256x256 mode has only 8 colors and flash but the QL flash is very strange. The flash bit just turn it on, so if you set this bit the NEXT pixels will flash. It is something like Amiga HAM without colors... The 68008@7.5MHz is indeed faster than the 7501 of the plus4 but due to the video contention the actual frequency of the 68008 is only about 4 MHz. So the 68008 can be slower than the 7501 for byte arithmetic, branches, etc... Pi-spigot is much faster on the QL mainly because of the 68008 hardware division. IMHO the presence of the plus4 reduced the sales of QL much.
It would have been a fantastic if a home computer could use digital cassettes that time. This technology was available but somehow jammed. :(
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