Could you give us some code to look at? Pt-Change( should definitely work

I'm not sure what you mean, could you give an example of what you want to do?

As for Axe knowledge, I think I started using Axe around 11 years ago, so it's just experience. I've never been a heavy user of Axe since I was comfortable as an assembly programmer by the time I learned about it, but I know enough to make simple programs (Axe can get very convoluted in the hands of a pro.)

L1 is 768 bytes, so 768*8 = 6144 bits.

For reference, I'm using https://axe.eeems.ca/Commands.html to look things up. Eeems (an admin) hosts that Axe reference sheet and it's really handy

That's assuming you have 8 bytes per row, but i think you might be mixing things up.

If you want 5 bytes per row (that's 40 bits total per row), you'd do  "{L1+(5*Y)+X}" where the 5 is how many bytes per row.

That's the code if you want a 5-by-5 array of 8-bit numbers

Not 25 variables per se, but 25 elements, so if you want 1-byte elements, you'd need 25 bytes

This is an example of where it's up to you how you want to store and retrieve the data, but commonly, people choose to store it row-by-row. The first five elements are the first row, the next five elements are the second row, and so on.

Arrays start at 0, so an easy (not necessarily best) implementation might be to refer to element (Y,X) as "{L1+(5*Y)+X}" where Y and X are between 0 and 4.

Yup, I see no good reason for BCD floats. There is some usefulness to decimal floats, though-- they have the one advantage of BCD (don't have to be careful where base-10 representation is a must), but are nearly as efficient as binary floats in terms of storage. A 64-bit decimal64 has 16 digits of precision.

As for emulators, I use TIlem, but it does have glitches of it's own. One I found was it sometimes doesn't emulate the carry flag properly with add/adc/sbc on IX/IY, which was hell when testing some math routines I believe the problem is the emulator stores them internally as int32 or int64 and doesn't handle 16-bit overflow.

I never followed up with this! A little while after, I refined this significantly and then a year or two ago, I implemented it in my z80float z80float library (link is directly to sqrtHLIX sqrt32) and that's how I made square roots faster than multiplication.

Today I was excited to learn that this is how GMP does it, it just looks scarier there because they are optimizing the notation to make it easy to implement in code without necessarily understanding how it works (which is cool, they present the pseudocode in a very easy-to-digest manner). But that's not what I'm here for, I'm here to show how it works!

Here is the TL;DR if you don't want to go through the derivation:
##
\begin{array}{rcl}
x_{0} & \approx & \sqrt{c} \\
a_{0} &=& c - x_{0}^{2} \\
q_{n} + \frac{r_{n}}{2x_{n}} &=& \frac{a_{n}}{2x_{n}} \\
x_{n+1} &=& x_{n} + q_{n} \\
a_{n+1} &=& r_{n} - q_{n}^{2} \\
\end{array}
##
(The third line means "divide ##\frac{a_{n}}{2x_{n}}##, but truncate at some precision to get the quotient and the remainder")

---

Let's start. I like the "Babylonian Method" where you start with a guess ##x_{0}## as an approximation to the square root of ##c##, then you run this iteration a few times until you have the precision you want:
##
\begin{array}{l}
x_{n+1} &=& \frac{\left(x_{n}+\frac{c}{x_{n}}\right)}{2}
\end{array}
##
All you are doing is averaging the guess, with ##c## divided by that guess. If your guess was an overestimate, ##\frac{c}{x_{n}}## is going to be an underestimate, so their average will be closer to the actual answer.


And that's just a simplification of the Newton Iteration:
##
\begin{array}{l}
x_{n+1} &=& x_{n} + \frac{c-x_{n}^{2}}{2x_{n}}
\end{array}
##

We are going to build off of the Newton Iteration, but make it a little more complicated by turning ##c-x_{n}^{2}## into it's own recurrence:
##
\begin{array}{l}
a_{n} &=& c-x_{n}^{2} \\
x_{n+1} &=& x_{n} + \frac{a_{n}}{2x_{n}}
\end{array}
##

And actually, in practice we are going to truncate that division so that ##q_{n} + \frac{r_{n}}{2x_{n}} = \frac{a_{n}}{2x_{n}}## where ##q_{n}## is the (truncated) quotient, and ##r_{n}## is whatever the remainder was after dividing by ##2x_{n}##. So what we'd really be doing is:
##
\begin{array}{rcl}
a_{n} &=& c-x_{n}^{2} \\
q_{n} + \frac{r_{n}}{2x_{n}} &=& \frac{a_{n}}{2x_{n}} \\
x_{n+1} &=& x_{n} + q_{n}
\end{array}
##

Now that everything is more complicated, let's take a look at what happens to ##a_{n+1}##:
##
\begin{array}{l}
a_{n+1} &=& c-x_{n+1}^{2} \\
&=& c-(x_{n} + q_{n})^{2} \\
&=& c-(x_{n}^{2} + 2x_{n}q_{n} + q_{n}^{2}) \\
&=& c - x_{n}^{2} - 2x_{n}q_{n} - q_{n}^{2} \\
&=& a_{n} - 2x_{n}q_{n} - q_{n}^{2} \\
\end{array}
##

Already, we have an optimization. Those two multiplications are half the precision of a full ##x_{n+1}^{2}## if you do it right, and that is strictly faster. But we're not done! Remember that division? Let's re-write it:
##
\begin{array}{rcl}
q_{n} + \frac{r_{n}}{2x_{n}} &=& \frac{a_{n}}{2x_{n}} \\
2x_{n}q_{n} + r_{n} &=& a_{n} \\
r_{n} &=& a_{n} - 2x_{n}q_{n} \\
\end{array}
##

Well ain't that awfully convenient? Let's rewrite our ##a_{n+1}## recurrence:
##
\begin{array}{l}
a_{n+1} &=& a_{n} - 2x_{n}q_{n} - q_{n}^{2} \\
&=& r_{n} - q_{n}^{2} \\
\end{array}
##

So now we've significantly improved that step by replacing the squaring operation with one at half the precision! Let's look at the recurrence relations now:
##
\begin{array}{rcl}
q_{n} + \frac{r_{n}}{2x_{n}} &=& \frac{a_{n}}{2x_{n}} \\
x_{n+1} &=& x_{n} + q_{n} \\
a_{n+1} &=& r_{n} - q_{n}^{2} \\
\end{array}
##

Neat!

---

Now let's retry our example of finding the square-root of 21:
##
\begin{array}{rcl}
x_{0} & \approx & \sqrt{c} \\
&=& 4\\
a_{0} &=& c - x_{0}^{2} \\
&=& 21-16 \\
&=& 5 \\
q_{0} + \frac{r_{0}}{2x_{0}} &=& \frac{a_{0}}{2x_{0}} \\
&=&\frac{5}{8} \\
&=&.5 + \frac{1}{8} \\
x_{1} &=& x_{0} + q_{0} \\
&=& 4.5 \\
a_{1} &=& r_{0} - q_{0}^{2} \\
&=& 1 - .5^{2} \\
&=& .75 \\

q_{1} + \frac{r_{1}}{2x_{1}} &=& \frac{a_{1}}{2x_{1}} \\
&=&\frac{.75}{9} \\
&=&.083 + \frac{.003}{9} \\
x_{2} &=& x_{1} + q_{1} \\
&=& 4.583 \\
a_{2} &=& r_{1} - q_{1}^{2} \\
&=& .003 - .083^{2} \\
&=& -.003889 \\

q_{2} + \frac{r_{2}}{2x_{2}} &=& \frac{a_{2}}{2x_{2}} \\
&=&\frac{-.003889}{9.166} \\
&=&-.0004243 + \frac{.0000001338}{9.166} \\
x_{3} &=& x_{2} + q_{2} \\
&=& 4.5825757 \\

\end{array}
##

EDIT: updates z80float link to point to the routine that actually implements this