I'm a little confused by your comments. I'd expect a custom optimized blitter you wrote for a 68K based Palm device to be slower than the OS blitter in Palm OS 5 because the former will be emulated while the latter will be ARM native. What was once faster is now slower. The reason the emulator is indeed fast is that most of the time an application is running it's in an OS routine. All the OS routines are now ARM native, so they run nice and fast.
If you've got a processing bottleneck in your application (such as computing values in the Mandelbrot Set, as John Marshall did), these will have enough work to do that even when running ARM native, they'll still swamp the overhead of getting to and from ARM native code. If instead you have something that gets run a huge number of times, and is a bottleneck only because of that, then porting it to ARM won't help you. You need to get that inner loop into ARM native code! Don't trust your intuition when it comes to optimizing code. Run a profiler such as the one provided in POSE, and examine the results carefully. When you do find a bottleneck and optimize it, another bottleneck will be exposed. You can keep doing this, but after a few iterations you'll tend to have no one big bottleneck, but rather a bunch of separate things that each take 20% of the time. That's a good time to stop ;-) -- Peter Epstein -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
