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From: ejkst@cisunx.UUCP (Eric J. Kennedy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: OS/2 vs AmigaDOS, 1.4wish, and more!
Message-ID: <18051@cisunx.UUCP>
Date: 16 May 89 03:45:42 GMT
References: <2134@iitmax.IIT.EDU> <5625@microsoft.UUCP> <5664@microsoft.UUCP> <2649@ssc-vax.UUCP> <2954@rti.UUCP> <2968@cps3xx.UUCP>
Reply-To: ejkst@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Eric J. Kennedy)
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Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Comp & Info Sys
Lines: 24

In article <2968@cps3xx.UUCP> porkka@frith.UUCP (Joe Porkka) writes:
>Kind of interesting thing. At work I use a Zenith I*Mclone, 
>8Mhz 8086. Text output on a two plane screen of the Amiga
>is very much faster than the clones. Heck, Amiga text output
>is even faster than the 12Mhz '286 clones in the office.
>Even with the hardware extras on the Amiga, graphics rendered text
>is a lot more complex than with a  real text display.

It just depends on how much effort you put into it.  If you were to
simply type a file to the screen on the two machines, I don't know that
there would be much speed difference.  If you want to get fancy on the
Amiga, and use some sort of warptext routine, then yes, you can get it
blisteringly fast.  But to go even faster on a character-based display,
all you have to do is set up your screen in ram, and do a block move of
4 KB to to the correct memory location ($B0000 or $B8000 if I recall
correctly).  Moving 4 KB from one location to another is considerably
faster (and easier) than anything that I've seen done on the Amiga, by
the very nature of things.  This method is not always used, for various
reasons, not the least of which is to be compatible with multitaskers.
(like, Lotus 123 prints the date and "Ready" overtop Deskqview's windows)

-- 
Eric Kennedy
ejkst@cisunx.UUCP