john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell) (04/02/88)
Chuck McManis recently posted his estimates of the optimal amount of chip memory per total memory configuration. Not having anything other than chip ram (except for a while with 1 extra meg, during which time I never had _any_ memory shortages except with Prowrite v1), I can't offer my own. Just a couple of points: Depending on your inclination, you may use expansion memory mostly for things like disk caching with FaccII, holding enormous ramdisks full of large programs, and running non-graphic software like compilers. Or, you may want to really push DPaint while at the same time having extra screens, fonts, etc open which may put you close to the half-meg limit. In this case I would recommend using the ramdisk residing in expansion memory as a kind of "iconify" feature -- ie you could save your picture, shut down DPaint or whatever, and when you needed it again fire it up (from ram:) by clicking on the picture icon (also in ram:). While this isn't ideal, it isn't much different from asking a chipmem-intensive program to free up the memory it was using, keeping an image of that memory and of the executable in fast memory. Come to think of it, why not have an option for DPaint (or other memory hungry program) to do exactly that -- copy all graphics structures into fast memory, deallocate all chipmem screens & buffers, and "iconify" itself on the WB window? Since this would be only of use to certain people, it might be necessary for future programs to give the user a fine control over use of overlays at startup time: "ok DPaint XII, load in all drawing code and iconify section, but not the ham mode enhancements or image-processing routines". John -- "Do you support capitalism?" "No sir! Our party feels that free enterprise under God is the best system!" "Er, that's what capitalism is..." -- a guy starting his own religious political party here