[Coco] Windows vs. Linux (was 512K upgrade)

[L. Curtis Boyle]

Ironically, Bill and I did put some GetStat calls in NitrOS-9 (around 1.15? 1.16? Can't remember) that allowed one to get the MMU block numbers for any screens you were using, specifically for doing games. You can "legally" map in a screen created by VDGINT already, of course, which is what games like Koronis Rift use, but we wanted the best of both worlds (you could use "normal" display commands for graphics primitives like lines, bars, circles, text fonts, etc., plus windowing commands, the Multi-Vue GUI, etc.... but you could also map the screen in for direct access). Since you could allocate multiple screens, you could even do screen flipping games this way. The first version of Shanghai that Bill Nobel ported actually used this call, to make the direct screen writes "legal". Unfortunately, I believe this was later removed, and the GetStat as well. There were a few things removed (including transparency for hardware text fonts), which was disappointing... we wanted to expand the OS, not just keep speeding it up.
I don't know if these have been reinstated in the latest versions... hopefully, somebody still active in NitrOS-9 can let me know.

In other words, Nick - we were settings things up so that you wouldn't mind NitrOS-9 so much... :-p

L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net



On Mar 12, 2014, at 9:28 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday 12 March 2014 23:27:30 Mark McDougall did opine:
> 
>> On 13/03/2014 1:39 PM, Bill Pierce wrote:
>>> Nick, I was going to stay out of this one (even though it started
>>> from my post :-) until you said OS9 is slow....
>> 
>> Can someone please pass the popcorn?
>> 
>> Regards,
> 
> Why, you think this is going to be a long show? :)
> 
> Cheers, Gene
> -- 
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> 
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