Saturday, 31 October 2009

ZX Spectrum on Maemo

Seems funny to think that my first computer still lives, albeit in emulation on my phone...

Here the links to the Speccy ZX Spectrum Emulator Homepage and to the listing at Maemo.org for the downloads for the Nokia N800/810 and N900 devices.

An interesting comparison:
  • ZX Spectrum:  16k (48k model also) RAM, Z80 8-bit CPU at 3.5Mhz, mass storage: tape drive or 100k microdrive
  • N900: 1Gb RAM, TI OMAP 3430: ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz, PowerVR SGX with OpenGL ES 2.0 support, mass storage: 32Gb to 48Gb solid state memory (specs at Maemo.org)
A very naïve and simple comparison means that the N900 has about 62,000 times as much memory and about 600 times the raw-processing power, though real meaningful figures are almost impossible to make given memory speed, bus speed, technologies such as DMA and the processor architecture and instruction set etc (so, why did I bother?)

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