> If thousands of people would work on this indefinitely the time would drop to seconds.
Even the small Apple II screen takes 7.5 kilobytes of RAM. Reading https://imapenguin.com/2022/06/how-fast-can-a-6502-transfer-..., just writing all of that to the screen takes a tenth of a second, for just over 50,000 pixels, and that’s ignoring the idiosyncratic video memory layout of the Apple II.
Going below ten seconds for decompressing that would mean you must produce 5 output pixels every millisecond, which means you have about 200 CPU cycles per pixel. On a 6502, that’s less than 100 instructions.
That makes me doubt it can get under 10 seconds.
⇒ if you want to get down to seconds, I think you’ll have to drop even more image data than this does, and do that fast.
Even the small Apple II screen takes 7.5 kilobytes of RAM. Reading https://imapenguin.com/2022/06/how-fast-can-a-6502-transfer-..., just writing all of that to the screen takes a tenth of a second, for just over 50,000 pixels, and that’s ignoring the idiosyncratic video memory layout of the Apple II.
Going below ten seconds for decompressing that would mean you must produce 5 output pixels every millisecond, which means you have about 200 CPU cycles per pixel. On a 6502, that’s less than 100 instructions.
That makes me doubt it can get under 10 seconds.
⇒ if you want to get down to seconds, I think you’ll have to drop even more image data than this does, and do that fast.