On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 01:59:32AM +0100, Davison, Lee wrote:
> > So what happens if you try to do disk access while displaying
> > animations?
>
> The animations get displayed, the disk gets accessed. There's enough
> performance available to handle four disks and the display simultaneously.
Yep... there's a detailed picture of the cycle interleave with various DMA
events and processor accesses in the system documentation (probably the
Hardware RKM, but I don't have it here to check).
What happens in cases of heavy custom-chip access is that the processor
gets starved for cycles, much like the processor is held off on Classic
Mac designs anytime the video is being painted (giving a 8MHz Mac Plus an
equivalent performance to a 5MHz chip). The difference is that with the
Amiga, the only time this happens is a) when accessing CHIP RAM (as opposed
to ROM or FAST RAM), and b) when using some of the higher resolutions and/or
deeper bitplane modes (32 colors, HAM, etc.) When tooling around on the
default workbench, the processor is running at full speed.
-ethan
--
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Received on Thu Jul 29 2004 - 20:49:19 BST