[Coco] Wordpak

[Chuck Youse]

On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 07:56 +1000, Mark McDougall wrote:

> Yeeow!! I'd also be very interested to know exactly how they managed to make 
> it so slow - must've taken some doing! ;)

I think it's the snow-avoidance.  This board appears to suffer from the
same problem as the first-generation CGA boards (not MDA, IIRC).
Contention between the CPU and the video display, CPU gets priority.  If
you don't wait for a blanking interval you get snow.

Combine this will a lack of interrupts from the Wordpak and a
multi-tasking OS like OS-9, and I can see how one might get into that
mess.. just conjecture though, haven't looked at the drivers closely
enough to determine why.

C.