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From: johnhlee@hermod.cs.cornell.edu (John H. Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: FAUG demo of Powermonger by E.A. -- long review
Keywords: simply incredible
Message-ID: <49653@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 12 Dec 90 19:33:06 GMT
References: <1950@unlisys.in-berlin.de> <1990Dec5.110344.6364@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <1787@seti.inria.fr> <1990Dec10.133123@avahi.inria.fr> <22110@well.sf.ca.us> <1990Dec12.114250@avahi.inria.fr>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: johnhlee@cs.cornell.edu (John H. Lee)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 44
Summary:
Followup-To:

In article <1990Dec12.114250@avahi.inria.fr> colas@avahi.inria.fr (Colas Nahaboo) writes:
>In article <22110@well.sf.ca.us>, farren@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Farren) writes:
>> That's Mike, not Marc :-)
>
>oops... Sorry!
>
>> So what?  There's also no multitasking, and no hard drive.
>
>Let me try another explanation for nuking the OS. I am new to the amiga world,
>but multitasking on the amiga with many processes accessing the drives seems
>to me an error-prone situation... By doing this I often get corrupted I/O
>which I dont get by doing things sequentially. (*)
>
>No, I'm not saying that AmigaDos is at fault, it may be one of the 10 resident >drivers/utilities I use which is at fault, but this stresses my point: If you
>want PowerMonger to multitask, it is because you are a power user, and thus
>are using tons of little taks whose interaction may lead to problems, making
>you say "PM doesn't works", but the problem may be in your super-hyper-duper
>screen saver...
>
>So they perhaps want to avoid having bad reputation because of other people's
>fault... Or they have discovered a bug in the OS preventing safe multitasking
>for their purposes.
>
>(*) As an example: Seems to me that using two concurrent processes to read
>MSDOS disks via MSH yields you corrupted buffer I/Os, but I'm not sure

Wrong.  Two concurrent processes accessing the disk will not corrupt buffers,
even if they use MSH.  Before you make another blatently false statement
like that, you should learn about the system first and make sure you know
what you're talking about.  You may be using an older version of MSH with
a bug in it.  I do often exactly what you describe with no problems.  If a
utility or other system addition made by the user does something wrong, it
is the user's problem and *not* a justification for taking over the system.
Just because a person wants his game to multitask doesn't make him/her a
poweruser.  Plenty of other games with high performance graphics multitask
fine.  There is no OS bug to hinder the sort of things a game needs to do.

Sorry, you've seemed to have earned my wrath today.  I have seen too many
games take over the system for no good reason and too many people defending
it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The DiskDoctor threatens the crew!  Next time on AmigaDos: The Next Generation.
	John Lee		Internet: johnhlee@cs.cornell.edu
The above opinions of those of the user, and not of this machine.