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Text File | 1989-04-20 | 13.0 KB | 292 lines

Quick STuff release 1.3 ======================= April 13, 1989 (C) 1989 by Darek Mihocka and Ignac A. Kolenko Jr. This ARC file contains 4 files: QUICK13.DOC - this file QVIEW13.PRG - Quick View - text file viewer QFIND13.PRG - Quick Find - file finder QINDEX13.PRG - Quick Index - system performance index This release contains 3 Quick programs, which are part of the upcoming release of the Quick ST desk accessory. A one time $30 shareware fee will entitle you to receive the accessory, and updated versions of these and other Quick programs. Quick ST is a special desk accessory designed to replace most of the current memory hog desk accessories, such as the Atari Control Panel and VT52 emulator, Deskcart, Cornerman, and others. It uses memory sharing techniques to offer most of the features of the other desk accessories in a package that uses less than 64K of memory. Each one of the standalone Quick programs can be configured by Quick ST to run from the desk accessory, as well as being able to run from the desktop. To encourage users to support this shareware product, we are making available stand alone versions of some of the Quick programs. This release contains Quick View, Quick Find, and Quick Index. Quick View ---------- Quick View is a fast text file reader. It can run as a GEM based file reader, and as an installed application which replaces the desktop's "Show" function. To run it as a standard application, simply double click on the file QVIEW13.PRG in any resolution. A dialog box briefly appears, which is then replaced with the ST file selector. Select a text file to view, and click on the OK button. When the file loads, it will be displayed in 80 columns. Use the cursor keys to scroll up and down the file, and press Esc or Undo to return to the main dialog box. Press the Help key for the help screen. To view the file again, click on the View button. To print the file, click on Print. Quick View now supports 50 line displays on monochrome monitors, and as before, it is one of the fastest file viewers around. To run Quick View as an installed application, click once on the file QVIEW13.PRG and then select Install Application under the Options menu entry on the ST desktop. Then type in the 3 letter file type that you wish to install Quick View for. Typical text file types are DOC, TXT, and ASC. Once installed, all you need to do is double click on a text file. Instead of getting the usual "Show Print Cancel" alert box, Quickview will load and display the text file. Note, the Install Appliation feature of the desktop does not properly save out the full path of Quick View. This forces you to keep your text file in the same folder as Quick View. This bug is fixed in TOS 1.4, but for now, the fix is to edit the DESKTOP.INF to insert the full path. Quick View can also run from a command line interpreter, and will accept one command line parameter, specifying the path and name of a text file. Quick Find ---------- Quick Find is a program developed for locating files. Although it may usually suffice to open a window from the ST's desktop, this does not allow you to only view certain files on the disk. Quick Find allows any number of drives to be searched, producing output which can be printed to screen, printer or file. Thus, Quick Find can also double as a disk cataloger. Quick Find is an outgrowth of our earlier WHERE.PRG, which was similar to the popular public domain program WHERE.COM in MSDOS. To use Quick Find, double click on the file QFIND13.PRG. A dialog box will appear, and the screen colors will change to white, black, red and green (on a color monitor only!). Enter your search mask in the edit field, select the drives you wish to search, and click on "Search" to begin. It's that simple. If you wish, you can change the output device from the default CON: to PRN: (printer), or select a file to save the output to. When you do a search with FILE selected, a standard file selector will appear, propting you to pick an output file. When viewing on the screen, pressing CTRL-S will stop the output, CTRL-Q will start it up again. Help, Info and Exit, obviously, do as expected. An important notice to hard drive users: due to the 40 folder bug in TOS, be careful of how many times searches are done. Use a folder fix program at all times (it saves much heartache), or use TOS 1.4. Now, you'll never, ever again have to kick yourself, wondering where you last created a file. And if you're a hard drive user, by cataloging the entire hard disk, you'll probably realize quickly that you're disk is in need of clean-up (depending on the editor, you may have a million .BAK files!) The only bad thing about a utility like this is that if you loose it, it'll never be able to find itself ... Quick Index ----------- Ever wondered how fast your ST is? With the different versions of TOS, and all of the dozens of TOS "hooks" already available (e.g. GDOS, Turbo ST), almost every ST system is unique. And soon, the 16 MHz boards and the Atari TT will be available. With all these different ST systems, the time has arrived for a benchmarking program to evaluate the efficiency of these STs. Quick Index measures the speed of 5 different parts of the ST: - effective CPU - VT52 text output - GEM dialog boxes - GEMDOS file creation - raw disk DMA sector I/O To run Quick Index, double click on the file QINDEX13.PRG. When the main dialog box appears, click on the GO! button. The 5 tests will start. After about one or two minutes, the results of the tests will be printed beside the 5 categories. Each one of the 5 categories can be selected and deselected by clicking on the category name with the mouse. Only selected categories will be tested when GO! is clicked. By selecting which drive to test, you can measure the relative efficiency of various disk drives. Even on the same hard disk, different partitions will give very different GEMDOS results, depending on the size of the partition and the number of files on it. As a reference, we used a stock 520ST with a single sided floppy disk and color monitor (in low resolution). Such a system will show speeds of 100% in each of the 5 categories. Other systems we used for comparison were 520STs and 1040ST with TOS 1.2 and 1.4 installed, with and without Quick ST, Turbo ST, Deskcart, and GDOS. Here is a sample of the kind of numbers we get: CPU index: this should always be 100%, give or take 1%. A slower number indicates possible wait states of the ST's memory, or a desk accessory (such as Deskcart, or corner clocks) which uses up extra CPU time. A higher number should be expected when using an accelerator board. BIOS text: this measures the efficiency of the BIOS text output function (i.e. the VT52 emulator). Depending on the version of TOS, this number will vary between 100% and about 150%. Using a software blitter, such as Turbo ST or our own Quick ST will result in numbers in the 300% range. We didn't have a real blitter to test with. GEM draw: This figure gives the relative speed of drawing the Quick Index main dialog box 16 times, each time shifted over one pixel. TOS 1.4 is about 50% faster at doing this than TOS 1.0, although the blitter should be even quicker. With Atari's GDOS installed, the number drops below 100%! Note: medium resolution color and monochrome screens will cause the BIOS and GEM numbers to change. They will usually be higher, showing that screen operations are faster than in low resolution. This is because low resolution has 4 bit planes instead of 2 or 1. Screen resolution does not affect CPU speed, as on the 8-bit Atari. GEMDOS I/O: This measures how efficient GEMDOS is at creating and deleting files. TOS 1.4 is supposed to do this quicker, but we found that TOS 1.4 is actually slower when using the disk caching program provided with it! This probably due to the write-thru caching. TOS 1.4 with a hard disk still comes in at 1900%, while a RAMdisk is around 9000%! DMA read: This index shows how fast it takes to read the first 64K block of sectors from the given disk. A RAMdisk rates at over 10000% the speed of a floppy disk, which hard disks are in the 3000% range. This test can be used to determine the efficiency of various formatting techniques, such as various interleaves, "twisting", or skewing. Note: the disk benchamrks may vary slightly from test to test due to variations in seek time, motor speed, soft errors, etc. One interesting observation was that a double sided disk formatted with DC Formatter scored 43% on the GEMDOS test, but 182% on the DMA test. In other words, "twisted" disks may read faster but may cut down the speed of other disk operations. The following information was provided by a tester of Quick Index. All tests were done on a Mega ST with 40 meg hard disk. TOS 1.2 used the FOLDERXXX.PRG while TOS 1.4 used CACHE90.PRG CPU BIOS GEM GEMDOS DMA Tested Software Performance% text% draw% I/O% Read% ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TOS 1.4 with TurboST & G+ Blitter on: 100 299 261 2557 3182 Blitter off: 100 299 231 2557 3387 TOS 1.4 & G-Plus on, Turbo not active Blitter turned on: 100 151 238 2607 3348 Blitter turned off: 100 134 171 2557 3218 TOS 1.4 & G-Plus turned off TurboST active Blitter on: 100 328 230 2582 3182 Blitter Off: 100 328 208 2607 3236 TOS 1.4 & G-Plus turned off TurboST not active, Blitter on: 100 162 231 2607 3218 Blitter off: 100 162 213 2607 3218 Running the test with a single sided disk drive showed a GEMDOS I/O of 101% and a DMA read of 146% When run on a double sided disk the results were slower, GEMDOS I/O of 99% and a DMA read of 100% =================================================================== Same Tests run with the MEGA ROMs (built in OS) CPU BIOS GEM GEMDOS DMA Tested Software Performance% text% Draw% I/O% Read% ------------------------------------------------------------------ TOS 1.2 with TurboST & G+ Blitter on: 100 327 240 2607 3236 Blitter off: 100 298 215 2582 3236 TOS 1.2 & G+ on TurboST not active Blitter on: 100 162 223 2557 3200 Blitter off: 100 143 163 2557 3200 TOS 1.2 & G+ turned off TurboST active Blitter on: 100 328 213 2533 3236 Blitter off: 100 327 194 2607 3291 TOS 1.2 & G+ turned off TurboST not active Blitter on: 100 162 198 2533 3218 Blitter off: 100 143 151 2533 3272 Note: the fact that the % shown in the final test are higher than the expected 100% benchmark indicates that the Mega ROMs do offer better performance than the original 520/1040 ROMs in many areas. Conclusions: 1) The Mega ROMs are faster than the original ST ROMS 2) TurboST and G-Plus conflict somewhat though they still offer an overall increase in speed. 3) None of the utilities have a major impact on disk access speed. 4) The blitter DOES offer a performance increase, though not a massive one. It's text impact is minor, though its effect on graphics is more noticable. 5) The new TOS 1.4 is faster than the Mega ROMs, but doesn't gain the same % boost in performance from the utilities tested as do the Mega or original ROMs. 6) TOS 1.4 seems more 'blitter independent' that TOS 1.2 in its text handling. and offers faster graphics handling both with and without a blitter being active. 7) TurboST performs better with TOS 1.2 than 1.4 though both benifit from having it present. Comments are welcome -------------------- To become a registered user of Quick ST and all of the related Quick programs, send a $30 check or money order to: Darek Mihocka Box 2624, Station B Kitchener, Ontario N2H 6N2 Canada You can reach us by modem on the following networks: Darek Mihocka: Compuserve: 73657,2714 BIX, Delphi, GEnie: DAREKM Ignac Kolenko: UNIX mail path: watmath!watcgl!electro!ignac We hope to see everyone on May 6th and 7th at the Michigan Atari Computer Expo. It's going to be a great show!