Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!umich!ox.com!yale!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Multitasking ona GS
Message-ID: <14050@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 8 Oct 90 12:23:21 GMT
References: <9010071043.AA06954@lilac.berkeley.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 35

In article <9010071043.AA06954@lilac.berkeley.edu> lwv27@CAS.BITNET writes:
>Is anyone out there using Softswitch on a GS?

Yes, I use it mostly when playing 8-bit Apple games, in order to add a
"save state" feature to them.  It works quite nicely, so long as you
don't do anything crazy such as removing a file from one "window" while
it's being used in another "window".

>I am thinking about revising my setup so that I would boot into SoftSwitch
>and running ecp8 in one window, TIC in another, binscii in another and
>shrinkit in the last.

? While this sounds pretty nice, you don't "boot into" SoftSwitch.  What
you'd do here would be to boot into ecp8, and when it reached the input
wait state pop into SoftSwitch to save ecp8 in one window, pop back to
ecp8 and load TIC, enter SoftSwitch to save the TIC state, restore ecp8
from the saved version, load binscii, enter SS, save binscii, restore
ecp8, load shrinkit (8-bit version), enter SS, save shrinkit, etc.

>Has anyone tried anything like this?  Am I just dreaming?

It sounds perfectly feasible to me.  I haven't tried that specific
combination; usually one of my SoftSwitch saved states is the old 8-bit
Desktop rather than ecp8, but unless ecp8 would get confused by memory
being allocated (via the toolbox) by "ghostly" means, i.e. any not under
its direct control, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work.  Each
regular application sees in effect a standard 128K Apple environment.

>How much memory am I going to need?

Each application needs about 128K, plus some for SoftSwitch itself.  500K
sounds a bit tight; you might be better off not tying up so much memory
for applications that are only occasionally needed, ESPECIALLY if they
need to be started from scratch for each actual use ("binscii" might be
in that category; I'm not familiar with it).