27 minutes ago, SlithyMatt said:
I don't think any one program would need all of these, unless it was a scientific calculator or really advanced spreadsheet. If you need to do one or two of these calculations very often, it would be totally worthwhile to take up the space in banked RAM.
Sure, but even if you take the smallest of the tables above, it is 64kb ... so several banks (actually 8 ). And each lookup need to lookup first the bank, than switch the bank and then lookup the value. Yes it is possible, but also slower than expected. Larger banks will even increase.
12 minutes ago, geek504 said:
I was thinking to use an external card using Memory Map I/O akin to VERA chip with its own memory banks, i.e. the external 2MB RAM accessible by the 32 bytes I/O memory. The X16's RAM would be preserved.
Using the SD card ... not sure how long you have to wait for a single load and also not sure how that even shall work. The SD card will most likely still emulate a IOdevice. But maybe I am wrong. Even if you can access the SD card on block level you need to setup the VERA registers, calculate what block you need, load the full block somewhere and then select the Value inside of the block. So most likely that is also not a good in the meaning of fast lookup procedure. It might be even slower than calculating it. Maybe someone has a good idea how that could be implemented, but I cannot see a fast way. Of cause we do not know how access through VERA to SD card will work.