Calculator graphics drawing benchmark

[Dave Britten]

(01-28-2022 08:05 PM)robve Wrote:  

(01-28-2022 07:15 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  Just for fun, I punched this into the Wizard BASIC card using my just-received OZ-7600 and got about 2.5 seconds. Same performance when the card is running in an OZ-7200.

Nice! Thank you for contributing.

It is interesting that the OZ-7600 BASIC card runs slightly faster for this benchmark than the PC-E500. I saw that a similar IQ-7700 for example runs 32,768Hz when the E500 runs at 2.3MHz (effectively though CPU instruction cycles take 3 clock cycles). So what is going on? The BASIC card has a CPU?

I wish I had the BASIC card. It seems unobtainable. I have a OZ-9500, which is nice, but can't do much with it.

- Rob

I don't know the exact speed, but I'm assuming the Wizard's CPU runs a lot faster than 32 kHZ. That looks more like the speed of the crystal oscillator that controls the real-time clock, since it's an organizer and all. The card doesn't contain its own CPU (as far as I know), but it does contain its own battery-backed SRAM for storage, as Wizard cards generally do.

The BASIC card isn't the easiest thing to find, but they do show up on ebay from time to time. I've bought a total of three of them myself over the years (two for my own use, and one as a gift), and I'm sure there were many more that passed by without me noticing. My advice is to just search for Sharp Wizard listings and start browsing, as they're sometimes bundled without mention in the listing title. I wish Sharp had made a similar BASIC environment for the OZ-9000 series, or the ZR-5000/3000 Zaurus models!

On a side note, the spreadsheet card for the OZ-7000/8000 is surprisingly good, and also worth tracking down.