----- Original Message -----
From: "Phoebus Dokos" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 5:33 AM
Subject: Re: [ql-users] CDROM driver for Q40/Q60 and Qubide
> At 12:32 �� 31/7/2001 +0200, you wrote:
> > On Lundi 30 Juillet 2001 21:01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > > [ CD-R(W) burning from SMSQ/E]
> > > The problem I see is the annoying Slaving mechanism of SMS. It
terribly
> > > slows down the machine, so how can you create the data stream needed
for
> > > burning?
> >
> >Simple (byt dirty) solution: the ported program will have to reserve most
> >of the free memory (letting only 2Mb or so left).
> >
The UCSD-Psystem for the QL used to do just this when booting. For running
from microdrives it would reserve a tiny amount of memory (512b, one
microdrive block, IIRC) and then use the rest of the memory to load its own
OS, etc.. For Floppies it would reserve 1.5Kb (3*512b blocks).
Altering this figure to increase the amount of caching by QDOS caused
serious effects on the performance of the system, because everything was
being cached twice, by UCSD Psystem and by QDOS.
Actually UCSD-Psystem was a very good OS: I used it on mainframes, minis,
PCs and the QL family. Still do occasionally. It supported Pascal, Fortran
and assembler, and the Pascal and Fortran programs would run on any machine
supporting the system. Many of the ideas in UCSD-Psystem were usurped,
unacknowledged, by Borland and used in Turbo Pascal: early versions of the
latter up to version 3 clearly show its parentage.
UCSD Pascal was one of the first implementations of Pascal and had
considerable commercial success. It introduced a string data type (used by
TP) and units (also used by TP from v4). All in all a pretty handy
language.
<snip>
> Surely there MUST be some other workaround... maybe a patch for SMS/QDOS?
> I wonder if TT is going to address the issue sometime. THE WEAKEST part of
> SMS/QDOS is i/o
Well it was designed to cope with a terrible mass-storage medium! It's a
pity that Sir Clive didn't put a single floppy into the QL instead of the
microdrives with an adequate power supply he would have sold millions. And
there would have been (less/no) need for the slave blocks.
Peter
--
Peter S Tillier [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily
those of my employer.
