Suddenly: A Speedup

Published on 2019-06-21 in µGame.

The SAMD21 powering the µGame consoles is not a daemon of speed. With 48MHz clock and software floating point operations, not to mention the overhead from CircuitPython interpreter, it’s barely enough for a dozen frames per second in a relatively simple game. But there is good news: a recently released beta version of CircuitPython, 4.1.0, has enabled an optimization option which has been so far disabled to save on firmware size. It had been re-enabled, because it turns out that it provides a five time speedup of the CircuitPython virtual machine, and the size savings weren’t that big anyways.

So now suddenly all µGames are going to be 5x faster as soon as you upgrade their firmware with 4.1.0 that you can download from http://circuitpython.org .