davea@vlsi.ll.mit.edu (Dave Allen) (01/06/89)
Not too long ago, Ethan Dicks (erd@saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu) posted a program called oneplane.c which reduces your workbench screen to one bitplane, speeding up text scrolling. I did some timing experiments to see how much speedup you get. I used a 720-line, 31-K text file on RAM: under WB 1.2 on my A1000. My text window was morerow'd to 25x80 characters. I used c:type to test the scrolling speed, and used DME 1.21 to page-down through the file to test full-screen rendering time. This second test involved hitting the page-down key 25 times; it took me four seconds to hit the key that many times, so 4 sec is the minimum possible time. I also did the scroll test using the built-in "cat" command of the Drew/Dillon shell 2.07. Scroll time Page time Vanilla system: 52 sec 10 sec (page redraw visible) With oneplane: 42 sec 8 sec (flicker on page redraw) With BlitzFonts: 42 sec 4? sec (almost no flicker on redraw) With both: 34 sec 4? sec Using cat with both: 22 sec - Dave Allen: internet davea@ll-vlsi.arpa or @vlsi.ll.mit.edu