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[Rant] AOS4 on AOne slow? Perhaps, perhaps not.ANN.lu
Posted on 23-Sep-2003 09:53 GMT by Fabio Alemagna105 comments
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Ok, I haven't had a chance to look at those videos until a few minutes ago, and I thought I'd give some reasons for which it appears slow, basign my judgments on what I see and what I know about the AmigaOS internals.

First of all, I must say that, although there was perhaps nothing more to see, those videos only show one little part of the GUI system, which, from what we know, could perhaps be the only one a bit flawed.

In essence, what we are shown are 2 things: the speed with which Reaction GUIs are drawn (in Solid-Resize and GUI-Reactivity), and the way (a faulty one - but read on) opaque window moving is implemented (in Opaque-Move).

Indeed, Reaction GUIs are drawn quite slowly, but I can't help but notice that Reaction GUIs have always been inherently slow, at least on my UAE setup, much slower than any other GUI, even MUI. The reason for this can be researched in the fact that Reaction uses a completely different approach than MUI, which is also the reason for which I greatly dislike Reaction in favour of MUI. However, it's obvious that the redraw is quite slow also considering Reaction's faults, and this is possibly due to the fact that the gfx library was emulated, along with a basic chipset support (some blitter thingies, like the BLTDONE flag in DMACONR register), which surely slowed everything down a lot.

Using this argument to say that AOS4 is at the same stage MOS was 2 years ago is pure flamebait for mainly 2 reasons: 2 years ago MOS already had a native gfx subsystem (which renders the comparision useless, although it might seem that it makes the situation even worse for AOS4), and also because this gfx subsystem is a temporary one, and we don't know at which state of development the new one is (but I reckon it's close to completion, or on the way to it). In any case, such comparisions are meaningless because AOS4 has now things which MOS didn't have 2 years ago, and vice versa.

About the opaque moving, instead, it can be noticed that there's a flaw in its implementation, which basically makes it *very hard* to *impossible* for the damaged windows to refresh themselves until the movement has stopped. Read Georg Steger's explanation of this phenomenon here

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AOS4 on AOne slow? Perhaps, perhaps not. : Comment 83 of 105ANN.lu
Posted by Andrea Maniero on 24-Sep-2003 07:48 GMT
In reply to Comment 77 (Ben Hermans/Hyperion):
Small recap:
@Ben Hermans
> 1. L2 cache not enabled
>
> 2. debuglevel erroneously set to 10 instead of 0
>
> 3. Smartrefresh not enabled
>
> 4. graphics subsystem and graphics driver in 68K code
>
> At least points 1-3 can easily be cured and we're working on 4.

Hello! Point 2 was already cured on Sunday, when both me and the author of that other report went to the show. Anyway, I clearly stated that one couldn't expect anything more from the A1 demo: and in fact I believe it was an achievement, and I'm quite happy for having been one of the first people in the world to have the possibility to take a look at it!
*But* what I was really disappointed by was the CSPPC version. Someone said we had too big and unfounded expectations. I don't think so. I distinctly remember that last year you said you wouldn't be present at the Aachen show because you (and in particular the Frieden bros) were too busy with the "last bits" of AOS4. That gave life to a lot of expectations - people on amiga.org were betting for a pre-Christmas release back then. I did believe you, so I was expecting AOS4 to be in a quite different form a year later, on CSPPC. You (and those betatesters that kept saying for the last year how usable the OS was) created a lot of expectations.
Therefore I (and the others who wrote other reports as well) expressed my genuine disappointment and disillusionment, because I feel somewhat cheated. The fact that I am ATM more interested in Peg+MOS (which I didn't hide, because I wanted to be as transparent as I could), doesn't change that.
I really do think you need to improve your straightforwardness (sp?) towards the community.
I honestly didn't want to give your project a cheap shot. I want to point out that I'm sorry for the mess a couple of genuine reports caused. Including the fact that an AOS4 betatester has been kicked out for apparently no reason but trying to defend one member of the community.

Kind regards,
Andrea
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#95 MarkTime
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