Quote:
Originally Posted by roondar
Edit: I love the 6502 and have never been a Z80 fan, but the comments on its relative speed compared to the Z80 are clearly false. The 6502 @1Mhz is not the same speed as a 3.5MHz Z80, it's a lot slower than that. It is true the 6502 is faster than the Z80 clock for clock. But the difference is much closer to being somewhere between 1.5 and 2x, not 3-4x.
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It depends on what you're doing. For 16bit maths and 3D stuff, the Speccy tended to walk all over the C64 (compare and contrast Carrier Command, for example, at least graphically) whereas the C64 excelled at banging memory around - all ops on the z80 take at
least 4 cycles to complete; the 6502 has a large swathe of ops that complete in 1 cycle.
But of course, you can't do a whole game using only the strongest ops of the CPU, so in practice yes the z80 was 1.5x faster. Let's also not forget that the C64 had a huge advantage in support hardware - although the Speccy's ULA could be coaxed into doing some pretty neat tricks, it never had any hardware sprites at all.