mykes@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz) (03/29/91)
I need to fill some of you in on why Budo appears to be slow when reading from diskette. The data for Budokan was created on an IBM PC and was ported over to the Amiga. The files contain huge amounts of LZH compressed data, and the decompression time for LZH is SLOWWWW. The disk routines keep the disk light on and motor running while the decompression takes place. If I had turned the motor off, the decompression time would have been much more obvious. Leaving the motor on helps to speed things up because the motor takes time to get up to speed and this would have been done several times (each time it goes to disk it loads/decompresses a few files). The uncompressed LZH data is kept in memory above 512K (if you have it) so additional floppy access is reduced for those of you who have the extra memory. I should point out that the decompress time was seconds, and it would still be so even if the data was read from hard disk. I can't speak for the Imortal, because I only wrote the routines for the floppy disk, but I wouldn't be surprised if they used LZH compression, too. -- ******************************************************** * Appendix A of the Amiga Hardware Manual tells you * * everything you need to know to take full advantage * * of the power of the Amiga. And it is only 10 pages! * ********************************************************