Faster Draw

[britlion]

Code:

DIM a as uinteger  

    FOR a=0 to 175
    PLOT 0,0
    DRAW 255,a
    NEXT a

My timings on this code suggest it's possible to make the DRAW command quite a lot faster. It takes about 9.2 seconds after ZX Basic compiles it and run on a 48K spectrum.

Running exactly the same code on a spectrum 128 with Beta Basic 4.0 added (find at: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseeki...id=0007956 ) completes in 5.9 seconds. (56% faster execution) Remember, this is running in an extended variant of basic. In the beta basic newsletter 12 he describes a method of queuing up plot and draw commands into a string variable (as if it was an array), and using a very fast draw method to draw the whole array. I haven't tried that yet, but I get the impression it will be far faster (for anything we'd need to draw on screen more than once, anyway - creating the 'array' is still quite slow)

I think Andrew wright's draw code must be pretty staggeringly fast to make that much difference in an interpreted language, though beta basic is generally faster. He has stated in material that his draw code is 2.5 to 3 times as fast as the Sinclair ROM code.

Boriel, your circle routine is incredibly fast (beta basic has, I think, something very similar) - and you've said that the draw routine is faster than basic. I'm not sure I can see the difference in speed with yours over sinclair. Here's a source you might want to look at for a much faster algorithm.

Just something you might want to look at some time!