steveg@SPARTA.COM (Steve Goldstein) (04/07/89)
I fall into the hacker/hobbyist category of ST user, as it was mentioned that
most of us seem to be. I've had my 1040 for a little over a year now. I've got a Supra 30MB hard drive, both monitors, and the SPECTRE 128 among other things.
Here are a few comments/answers/questions to current discussion topics that I
have not seen addressed:
Re: ANTIC - the initials stood for Another Television Interface Chip
Re: Business users and the ST - How important is parity RAM to business users?
the ST has no parity, so if RAM starts to go bad, you may have a
corrupted spreadsheet or database before you find out about your
memory. Does the Mac have parity? I would think anyone using their
computer for accounting/bidding etc would insist upon parity.
Re: My current project
I'm about to try and port an application I wrote for work (using Turbo
Pascal on an AT clone w/VGA graphics) to the ST using Prospero Pascal.
Most of the code is fairly standard, however there is quite a bit of
graphic specific code as well. In particular, I'm doing a lot of
pixel oriented operations. In looking thru my GEM docs, I find a get-pixel
routine, but no put-pixel (the closest I can find is a put-marker operation
with a marker type as point). I'd like to have a GEM interface to this
program, but I fear I will kill my graphics speed by going thru the VDI.
How safe is it to mix line-a calls with GEM? What I guess I'm really trying
to say in all this rambling, is: What's the best/fastest way to get a
pixel from the screen, change its color based on it's old color, and put
it back? Any help/comments would be appreciated.
-- Steve Goldstein <steveg@saic.com>daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie) (04/19/89)
in article <8904071554.AA03835@Fourier.sparta.com>, steveg@SPARTA.COM (Steve Goldstein) says: > Re: Business users and the ST - How important is parity RAM to business users? > the ST has no parity, so if RAM starts to go bad, you may have a > corrupted spreadsheet or database before you find out about your > memory. Does the Mac have parity? I would think anyone using their > computer for accounting/bidding etc would insist upon parity. Maybe, maybe not. IBMs and true clones have parity ram, most other personal computers and similar machines (Mac, Ataris, Amigas, and even NeXTs) don't. When, if ever (physics says it can happen) a bit gets blasted by cosmic rays on a non-parity checking machine, you don't notice it unless it's in a piece of code, at which point you have a good chance of crashing. But if it's in data, you probably end up saving the bogus data. A PClone just plain crashes when it detects a parity error, with a nice message on the screen telling you why you just lost the past 10 hours or so of spreadsheet work (well, really, no one does any REAL work on these things, do they). Parity detection lets you know an error occurred, but you can't do anything about it. And you present a target that's 9/8ths larger, so you have a 9/8ths greater chance per unit memory of having a zapped bit. Some workstations implement error correcting memory, which is a definite advantage all around, unless you're paying for it. > -- Steve Goldstein <steveg@saic.com> -- Dave Haynie "The 32 Bit Guy" Commodore-Amiga "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: D-DAVE H BIX: hazy Amiga -- It's not just a job, it's an obsession