> > I held off upgrading to OS
>> 9 until I'd hacked the SD8 extension into loading under that OS
>> (where it works fine, btw, at least for the "Faster Emulation" and
>> associated UI tweaks which are all I enabled).
>
>Hadn't heard about this hack! Tell us more...
Well, Speed Doubler used to be present as three entirely separate
components (Speed Emulator, Speed Copy, Speed Access). The last one
was ditched for SD8 because the OS disk cache it replaced was
improved in OS 8, but other essentially separate components were
folded in from the discontinued Connectix Powerbook (and Desktop)
utilities (which I never used, either in separate form or in the
upgraded SD). The result is that the SD8 product is actually a
hodgepodge of different patches, all loaded from a common shell and
administered from a common GUI.
All of these components are still pretty much in separate code
resources in SD8, so removing them is mostly a matter of removing
those resources. The loader code that gets them all has a Gestalt
check for the OS version and won't load for OS 9, but this is easily
patched in any app (just look for the "sysv" in the code and the
Gestalt hex form of the OS version, then change it (*) ).
The replacement code-caching emulator is very low-level, so my theory
was that it wasn't the part of SD that was incompatible with OS 9 (I
disagree with the notion that the product was discontinued because it
had become entirely superfluous - I think it just couldn't be updated
for compatibility without a lot of work). Thus I removed all the
other components that could cause problems, leaving only the loader
shell (which seems to include some of the GUI tweaks) and the
emulator, and patched the sysv checks in the shell. The result loaded
properly, and checking the performance of a tight GetNextEvent() loop
(the OS 9 event code is still 68k, and always will be) showed that it
was helping, at least for the very tight, entirely cacheable sort of
loop that utilities like Response Time can test. I've now been
running it for quite some time with no ill effects.
I can probably create a patcher that will take someone's installed
copy of SD8 and strip it down for use with OS 9. It still has the
copy protection checks of the original, so you need to start from a
properly-installed copy, and move over the preference file from an OS
8 System Folder to the OS 9 one. Obviously, it's probably only for
those who don't mind messing around with their system. ;)
(*) This also works in PPC code, but you need to take into account
that a 32-bit string constant like "sysv" is examined in 16-bit
chunks, because all PPC instructions are 32 bits wide for both
operator and operand - thus you'll find "sy" slightly separate from
"sv" and the checked-for system version farther on.
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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