Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "André Fachat" <afachat@gmx.de>
To: <cbm-hackers@musoftware.de>
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2019 2:51 PM
Subject: Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?
 
> Am 10. Januar 2019 20:46:35 schrieb Mia Magnusson <mia@plea.se>:
> 
>> Den Wed, 09 Jan 2019 00:41:11 +0100 skrev André Fachat <afachat@gmx.de>:
>>> Am 8. Januar 2019 23:08:17 schrieb Mia Magnusson <mia@plea.se>:

>> As a comparison, the first Commodore product fast enough to display 80
>> cols with an 8-bit bus (and no wait state / "snow" problem) were the
>> CBM-II/B series and later the PET 8296, and those came out later than
>> the initial IBM PC.
> 
> Actually the 8032 had an internal 16bit graphics data bus. The 8296 in  
> fact has an 8bit graphics data bus only, but used 4MHz RAM accesses.
----------------
Well, I wouldn't call it a 16-bit "graphics bus" and I wouldn't even call it a "bus" for simply latching two 8-bit memory chips simultaneously when the memory, the CRTC, the character generator, the pixel shift register etc. are all 8 bits, but that's semantics, albeit a little misleading.

"...the first Commodore product fast enough to display 80 cols with an 8-bit bus" - was it the first computer with an 8-bit bus to... or did it display 80 characters with an 8-bit bus...

It was a pretty clever hack though, basically putting two characters into the time slot of one instead of a straightforward sequential read and display requiring a faster clock.

But let's not start another 'discussion'... ;-)