aking@BBN.COM (Allen King) (05/19/89)
I'm tired of waiting for my 4 Meg to get zeroed every time I turn around. What's a good program to make initialization faster? I've gotten this far: 1. NULLFILL isn't very safe. I also can't find it on the net. Any ideas where I might locate it, presuming it has some value? 2. TURBODOS seems to take less time zeroing, but I'm scared about its deferred write cache. How do you flush it? 3. Does TOS1.4 solve this problem? Atari is no longer sending developers RAM TOS1.4's because the the ROM's "are a few weeks away" (but no committment when. (I hope that someday, perhaps in a future life, Jay Patton of Atari owns a machine that I designed.)) A good bboard list and some pointers would help a lot. -> 4. I realize that tighter coding speeds up the clear loop. Has anybody coded a FASTFILL.PRG? Couldn't the amount of memory cleared also be limited to some value, say 1MB? Wouldn't that catch most programs? Ergo FST1MFIL.PRG. Getting the sources for NULLFILL would be half the battle. I'm pissed that Atari's over performance in this area (clearing more than just BSS, and providing what initially amounts to a calloc'ing malloc) is being relied on by some programmers and it's crippeling my machine. Not really any blame, just my blood boils every time my disk stops spinning and I have to wait with a blank screen. Prevent an Ulcer, Recommend a Program!