[jimmoores]

On the original ARM2 this design made a lot of sense because if you understood how the instruction timing worked, you could essentially perform as well as a specialized blitter. I never understood this at the time, and largely blame that on a popular ARM Assembly Language book I had that said that LDM/STM were just convenience instructions, essentially syntactic sugar. They most certainly were not. With the right alignment and using enough registers you could get 2-3x the throughput of using single word load/stores. I honestly think if that book hadn't gotten it so wrong there would have been a lot more decent games for the Archimedes machines.