Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!hector!eric From: eric@hector.UUCP (Eric Lavitsky) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Software queries and comments Message-ID: <10497@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> Date: 8 Aug 88 17:18:16 GMT References: <1748@kalliope.rice.edu> Sender: netnews@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com Reply-To: eric@hector (Eric Lavitsky) Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill Lines: 51 In article <1748@kalliope.rice.edu> phil@rice.edu (William LeFebvre) writes: >Greetings! >Finally, a few comments about programs that take over the whole machine: >Electronic Arts is well-known for this atrocity. I looked at Deluxe Music >Construction Set at one point. I was really interested in purchasing it. >It didn't have everything I wanted, but it would have been sufficient. >Then I tried to pull the screen down. No dice. If it won't let me get >back to my Workbench, then I don't want it. I feel the same way about my This is not a fair statement. Deluxe Music multitasks just fine (to the extent of how many cycles are left over in the machine when it's running). The artifact of the WorkBench disspaearing is not that they take over the machine, but rather that they do a CloseWorkBench(), which is an Intuition supported call. Now, it would have been nice if they would have put in a menu toggle to turn it back on (I believe they did this in DPaint II), but there is a (I believe documented) way around this. Simply run something else on the WorkBench screen beforehand (like the clock) and the CloseWorkBench() will fail. >Why do commercial developers do that? It's throwing away one of the most >useful things about the machine: the user's ability to do many things at Simple - they do a CloseWorkBench() to try and free up as much memory as possible for their application. The logic here is that the user should be forced to do some extra action if he doesn't want to have the WorkBench closed to make the maximum possible amount of memory available to his/her application. One thing that some developers may want to think about doing is to do an AvailMem() first and only do a CloseWorkBench() if they really think there isn't enough memory around. And, always put in a menu toggle to turn the WorkBench on and off if your application is that intensive. >once. My never-ending thanks to the people who wrote "Amoeba Invaders". >Ya' did it right!!! > > William LeFebvre > Department of Computer Science > Rice University > Yea - haven't those guys (Late Night Developments) done something new? Maybe somthing commercial??? Eric ARPA: eric@topaz.rutgers.edu or eric@ulysses.att.com UUCP: {wherever!}ulysses!eric or {wherever!}rutgers!topaz!eric SNAIL: 34 Maplehurst Ln, Piscataway, NJ 08854 "To err is human; To really f*ck up requires the root password."