Multitos and MiNT getting a bad rep

[Yves Pelletier <ypelletier@cmc.aes.doe.ca>]

On Sat, 19 Mar 1994, jwahar r. bammi wrote:

> does anyone else get the distinct impression that MiNT is getting a
> real bad reputation as being a dog becase of MultiTOS. i got an
> unsolicited copy of the local north attleboro atari users group
> newsletter, where the main feature at this months meeting was a geneva
> demo. one of the big seeling points of geneva according to the
> newletter is that it is not a dog like MultiTOS. in the accompanying
> article, the author who reviews geneva offers this explaination as the
> main reason -- "Geneva uses ccoperative multitasking. This is the
> method used by MAC's system 7 and MSDOS Windows. .... MultiTOS is a
> pre-emtive multitasking. It severly controls each application's access
> to the CPU ......" [more nonsense deleted].

Sigh... Yes, it is getting a bit annoying, I see this everywhere.

I have Geneva myself, and I am fairly impressed with it, but I don't
use it, and won't,  as long as it remains incompatible with MiNT. 
I'll grant that on systems too small for Multitos,  Geneva is a very 
nice enhancement if you insist on multitasking applications.

> 
> maybe multiTOS is a dog, i dunno, never used it. but MiNT itself, as we
> all know is very acceptable (i use it with a shell usually,
> and/or with toswin sometimes).

I run Multitos every day (on a TT). I have version 4.0 of the AES and
MiNT 1.10 with some optimization patches. The only drawback is that I 
can't run Warp 9. (I know about NVDI but I don't have the money).

I ran a benchmark on GEM graphics and alphanumeric output, comparing
my Multitos setup with single-tasking GEM (TOS 3.06, no screen accelerator). 
Not only is Multitos _NOT_ a dog, it was actually 2 or 3 percent faster
than singletasking GEM on most tests. The only test that was drastically
slower under Multitos was window redraw (which is a more complex
operation under Multitos.)

Funny, though, I too used to complain about the speed of Multitos,
especially when running STalker. Could it be that there was such
and improvement between MiNT 1.04 and 1.10, that it would speed up
Multitos as a whole?

> 
> i leave you with another amusing quote from the same article
> 
> "Atari was so impressed with Eric Smith, the author of MultiTos, that
> they hired him. Given the performance of Geneva versus MultiTos, they
> should sign over the company to Dan Wilga, the author of Geneva".
> 

What a crock.


Cheers,

Yves
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Yves Pelletier                             ypelletier@cmc.aes.doe.ca
Section analyse et pronostic     
Centre Meteorologique Canadien             Not a CMC spokesman
*********************************************************************