mwm@raven.relay.pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) (01/16/91)
In article <41681@nigel.ee.udel.edu> new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes: In article <JIMB.91Jan14143121@pogo.ai.mit.edu> jimb@pogo.ai.mit.edu (Jim Blandy) writes: >A Mac running the Multifinder has non-preemptive multitasking; each >task voluntarily gives up control. The Amiga does preemptive >multitasking; a task may be stopped at any time. It's worse than this. Try starting up multifinder, hypercard, and (say) tetris. I just did this last night because I wanted to play tetris but the owner of the machine had the hypercard stack open. Anyway, the music was all messed up and the blocks fell at different speeds, making it difficult to play. I then realised that hypercard must be sucking up CPU time even though it was not active, it was not running anything, and the mouse was not near the window. Ho hum - you found broken software. I can show you software that has the same behavior on the Amiga (actually, I may not be able to anymore, because most of it's written in AmigaBASIC, which was so badly broken that it didn't make the transition to the A3000, which is the only machine I have now). Worse yet, I've got examples of such software that don't take over the machine, but only exit if you reboot the machine. Likewise, I always had higher tetris scores than my wife - but I only ran tetris while doing large makes. That slows things down enough to bust my scores above hers. The only thing surprising about your example is that the software came from Apple. Then again, CBM's flagship application (AmigaVision) doesn't use the HELP key.... <mike -- Estant assis, de nuit secrette estude, Mike Meyer Seul, repose sur la selle d'airain, mwm@relay.pa.dec.com Flambe exigue, sortant de solitude, decwrl!mwm Fait proferer qui n'est a croire vain.
ath@lcs.mit.edu (Andrew Heybey) (01/17/91)
In article <MWM.91Jan15123822@raven.relay.pa.dec.com> mwm@raven.relay.pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) writes:
Likewise, I always had higher tetris scores than my wife - but I only
ran tetris while doing large makes. That slows things down enough to
bust my scores above hers.
Yes, but if you ran make and its children at priority 0, and tetris at
priority 1 then tetris should show a minimal slowdown because it will
always run when it is not sleeping.
--
Andrew Heybey, ath@ptt.lcs.mit.edu, uunet!ptt.lcs.mit.edu!ath