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- >>>>> "ahem" == ahem <SYNNAD@uncvx1.oit.unc.edu> writes:
-
- ahem> Emilio Moreno:
- EM> Solarian II v1.03 It works fine. This is an amazing color
- EM> arcade game similar to Maelstrom. This SHOULD BE in a demo
- EM> volume only -refresh [GREEN]
-
- ahem> How'd you get it to work? I got it to work (perfectly but
- ahem> unstably - would always crash eventually) on an earlier
- ahem> version of Executor, but had no success with 1.99l.
-
- Back when Executor allowed programs to write directly to the screen
- and we used page faults to do "bank switching", Solarian would hang,
- because it would write a long word that straddled a page, and the
- architecture of most SVGA boards would not allow us to map a bank that
- would include the entire long, so the naive page handling code would
- switch back and forth from bank to bank, each time the instruction was
- restarted a new fault would occur and this would go on indefinitely.
-
- Now programs *can't* write directly to the screen, so you need to use
- "-refresh n" (where n is a number like 6) to periodically copy the
- memory that we pretend is the screen to the real screen. This is a
- significant performance hit, but it has no problems with Solarian.
-
- Eventually, we'll support some video boards ability to map linearly
- their frame buffer into memory and then we'll be able to let programs
- write directly to the screen (on PCs with those video boards) and
- we'll no longer have to worry about bank switching, since linear
- mapping obviates the need for bank switching. It's not clear whether
- or not this capability will be ready by the time 2.0 ships. Mat guess
- that it will, but we have a lot of other work to do as well.
-
- --Cliff
-
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-