I wanted to get some timings for PLASMA vs C for a few operations. I’m sticking with my “moving monster” theme and tracked the time for doing two different operations.

1. Drawing a frame of the monster (100 times), which involves
   • Flipping HGR pages
   • Getting the page address, getting Y address (lookup),  the byte for X (lookup) and adding them together
   • Getting frame for X (lookup) and calculating the offset to get to the correct frame
   • Memcpy() the data to memory
2. Do a simple no op for loop from 1 to 500 (100 times)

I fully admit that this is not an exhaustive test, but I just wanted to get an idea of how they compare. Again, this is not a “C is faster/better” post. PLASMA is impressive tech regardless of the times. It’s just out of my pure curiosity.

I added pretty much identical timing routines on the PLASMA and C side (after much time spent banging my head), but I’ll post on that later.

Results

Note: Times are in cs (centiseconds, i.e. 100ths)

100 Frames

C: 147 cs
PLASMA: 228 cs (155%)

Loop 500

C: 530 cs
PLASMA: 1368 cs (258%)

Videos

Because, I like videos.

C

PLASMA