Re: [MiNT] Re[2]: GEM boost

[Evan Langlois <Evan@CoolRunningConcepts.com>]

On Sat, 2005-07-16 at 17:48 -0700, Howard Chu wrote:
> Their weird, POS DMA controller. Despite their claiming 8 (was it 8?) 
> independent DMA channels, any large disk access would bring the system 
> to a halt, suspending the CPU until the access completed. It may have 
> just been a bad kernel driver issue, but I don't recall it improving in 
> later revisions of NextOS. (I used it from 0.8 thru 1.0 as I recall.)

Yeah their DMA controller was a waste of design and didn't do much but
make the system more expensive.  I'm running NS 3.3, but there really
aren't very many apps for it to really put it to use.  Its been off and
in the closet for awhile, so I don't remember how bad the hard disk
access was - most PCs don't do all THAT much better.  I love seeing the
spinning color-wheel mouse cursor on OS X - a little artifact left over
from the Color NeXT.

> I had a DOS shell for NeXT that would run TOS command-line executables 
> natively. Being a Unix CLI kinda guy I never wrote any graphics code 
> back then...

Really?  Thats interesting.  Did it wrap all the GEMDOS calls to the
Unix calls somehow?  Hmm .. should be just a matter of porting the VDI
and AES then.  Not sure if it would be worth the effort though, but it
would be interesting.

> Yeah, the '040 revision sounded pretty cool, but I had gotten 
> disillusioned by the '030 and abandoned NeXT by then.

I couldn't afford one until they were old and dead, so I got the 040
back in 1999, and got the OS upgrades for free from Apple.

> Hm.... I really wonder. Certainly that class of machine ought to be able 
> to run a dynamite 2D user interface. But I don't think it'd be faster 
> than a contemporary PC for compiling code, calculating FFTs (essential 
> to all audio and video compression), or other things we commonly do.

Possibly not at raw speed, but the eMAC may help slightly with FFTs and
other DSP operations.  My Linux box spends forever compiling (Gentoo).
Its pretty much necessary to upgrade constantly.  If I could just use it
instead of constantly upgrading and compiling, I wouldnt' care about
compilation speed as much.  Can always cross-compile on an AMD 64 :)
Oddly, I'd rather take the Coldfire even though its technically much
slower.

> The art of computer programming suffered a major blow when the M68K 
> family disappeared from desktop computing. AMD64 seems to be 
> philosophically picking up where we left off, after more than a decade 
> of suffering under the x86 architecture. *double sigh*

Wow - we exactly agree on something!