Posted By
MIK
on 2013-03-30
03:29:22
 |  Re: The addition to Plus/4 wikipedia article
If anyone can offer better then please do. I will not be offended as I would rather it be correct.
Litwr,
I have added the odd letter such as A and the odd word. Towards the end I reworded some of it to make it sound better. Note I know nothing of the serial port so kept it as close to your words as possible.
As for mouse support I felt the term Analog Device should be used rather than saying paddles?
The Plus/4's serial port uses (like C64's) TTL voltage which is incompatible with RS-232. It requires a voltage converter to use modems or other serial devices from non-Commodore vendors.
This means that, on average, with a standard 40x25 screen the Plus/4's CPU runs only about 25% faster than that of the C64. However, it's said that it can be 75% faster at screen blank mode. The Plus/4's PAL model may also be switched to NTSC mode by disabling the screen which sets the CPU frequency to 2.22 MHz[5]. So a Plus/4 (PAL) is one of the fastest 6502 based computers for raw calculations. This is also true for programs in machine code but the Plus/4's Basic is a bit slower than the C64's, the operations with strings are up to 100% slower. This result is caused by RAM/ROM switching procedures which should be called for with every byte of any Basic program. The NTSC model of Plus/4 is a about 10% slower than the PAL model displaying a standard screen but slightly faster with screen blank.
The Plus/4's TED has several advantages over C64's VIC+SID. All TED registers that are available can read and write. TED also proves to be a very effective means when it comes to creating 4-bit digital sound.
to Plus/4 weaknesses section:
The Plus/4 does not support analog devices via the joyports like the C64 mouse making programs with a GUI such as GEOS less friendly to use. However there is an unfinished project that allows the use of a standard IBM PC compatible serial mouse[6].
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