siccoyote wrote:Just wondering though what is the difference between using the 3k expansion and using the 8k expansion? Is 3k faster to access, just wondering as I was going to make a topic asking but this seems a perfect example.
All memory in the VIC-20 has the same access speed, one byte/cycle for the 6502. Especially there's no difference between RAM in the +3K and RAM in the +8K expansion.
What *can* make a difference - in BASIC! - is the possibly different length of
literal address values in the POKE command. Adding one digit incurs an extra (hidden) multiply by 10 and adding another digit, which slows down their use. We had a thread somewhere, where adding a RAM expansion indicated a slowdown, which could however entirely be attributed to the aforementioned effect, which has of course no relevance to machine language.
Holding down a key has a much greater effect - the full matrix scan of the keyboard slows down the VIC-20 by 10%.
sing the 3k expansion seems pretty rare, and it does mean changing the dip switches on my expansion card, so I was wondering if there are benefits to it?
If you can make a program/tool/game run with a smaller RAM expansion, go for it.
Using +3K RAM is not as rare as you may think. It has the nice benefit, that the position of screen and colour RAM is unchanged from unexpanded, and you can define UDGs quite easily by lowering the roof. Doing UDGs with +8K RAM or more is a bit more complicated, but still possible. See here for more details.