What is SPAMM?

If your Plus or SE is hungry for speed, feed it SPAMM. The System Program for Accelerated Macintosh Mathematics (SPAMM) is a utility that preempts and accelerates the math functions that are normally handled hy the Standard Apple Numeric Environment (SANE). It's designed to benefit the Mac Plus, SE, and 512KE, which don't have math coprocessor chips. It doesn't have the speed of a dedicated coprocessor, but it speeds up math-intensive calculations substantially. According to SPAMM's developer, a VersaCAD resizing operation took about half the time with SPAMM. I tested it with Super 3D on a Plus and an SE and found improvements of 12 percent to 27 percent; the more floating-point math is involved, the greater the speed. (Programs with built-in math routines, such as some spreadsheets and 3-D modeling applications, will not be affected by SPAMM's presence.)

SPAMM is a subset of tried-and-true math routines originating in MacCalc, a veteran spreadsheet application that boasts high-speed recalculation... Although SPAMM calculates floating-point values to 15 decimal places (compared with 19 places for SANE), many applications benefit more from speed than precision. The developer is working on a faster version of SPAMM that will let you opt for greater speed (at the expense of some precision).

Parascandolo, Salvatore. (August 1989). Wham, Bam, Thank You, SPAMM. MacUser. (pg. 42).

Download SPAMM for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac