[Color Computer] [coco] Learning MW C

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 14 August 2006 10:49, James Diffendaffer wrote:
>--- In ColorComputer at yahoogroups.com, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at ...>
>
>wrote:
>> On Sunday 13 August 2006 19:26, George's Coco Address wrote:
>>
>> I tried to reply to you, but it appears there's no way to pick your
>
>address
>
>> out of the posting, George, so this goes to the list.
>>
>> What I'm gonna say isn't really kosher on the coco lists, but that
>
>speed is
>
>> the biggest single reason I'm going to go out on a limb and tell you to
>> find a suitable box to run linux on, something with at least a 400 mhz
>> cpu, 256megs or more memory, and at least an old 4GB or larger hard
>
>drive
>
>> and a working parallel port.
>
>Not Kosher?  I wouldn't say that.  We all like the CoCo but we won't
>ever claim it will out benchmark a PC over 10MHz.  It did pretty well
>against an 8MHz 8088 but that's about it.
>
>I will say that if he want's to write his own software it might be
>more comfortable for him to do it on the CoCo.  He could always move
>the code to a PC later if he uses 'C'.  Can't do that with Basic09.
>
>>  With a monitor you can look at comfortably,
>> and if that mobo has builtin video, disable it in favor of an after
>
>market
>
>> el-cheapo nvidia card.  The problem is the onboard video tends to shoot
>> the machine in the heart when trying to do realtime work, the offboard
>> card won't.
>
>Well... that depends on what you are doing, how fast the PC is and
>what video mode you use.
>I have integrated video on one of my machines and it has side port
>video RAM so you don't see a performance hit unless you do heavy 3D.

The problem is that the realtime kernel when running, cannot be interrupted 
for the lengths of time, and the total amount of time it takes for the 
video to access its buffers in main memory.  This must be isolated else an 
irq expected to be serviced every 25 u-secs, is suddenly ignored for 300 
u-secs, totally destroying any hope of making a smooth motion, and 
possibly even ruining the part.  With an aftermarket cards accessing its 
own memory, the main memory and the cpu are free to do the job at hand in 
a timely manner.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.


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