Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!stpeter!cmcmanis From: cmcmanis@stpeter.Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Game: Heroes of the Lance. Summary: No fast available Message-ID: <129894@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 4 Jan 90 20:01:52 GMT References: <1277@corpane.UUCP> <5378@eagle.wesleyan.edu> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 36 In article <1277@corpane.UUCP>, (John Sparks) writes: > I recently bought SSI's "Heroes of the Lance" and found out that it > will not work on Amiga 1000's or with the New super Agnus chip (at least not > with 1 meg of memory on your machine). In article <5378@eagle.wesleyan.edu> (James Treworgy) comments: >That's strange; I have an Amiga 1000 (1.5 meg) and it works fine... No, what John has encountered is a whole new problem which once again demonstrates that you can lead a games programmer to a pile of documentation but you can't make him think. (Must be my day for flaming a particular group of folks.) (Note: Real programmers also program games, but theirs work on all Amiga models and configurations) The problem is will allocating memory. Some people allocate memory with AllocMem() or AllocRemember() and use the attribute MEMF_FAST. Why ? I suppose because they want to insure they get fast memory, but this has a nasty side effect on 512K Amigas and 1Meg Amigas with a Super Agnus. Namely, THERE IS NO FAST RAM. Oops, the allocation fails and the game goes Ptooey! This of course is the evil twin of those same programmers not specifying MEMF_CHIP on the early games when they needed it and having people with expanded Amigas yell and scream because the images and such looked like garbage! Read and understand : Don't ask for MEMF_FAST unless you *must* have it, just ask for 0 (essentally MEMF_ANY). If there is fast ram available you will get it, if there isn't you will get chip ram. This is generally the desired behaviour. Flame off... --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@Eng.Sun.COM These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you. "If it didn't have bones in it, it wouldn't be crunchy now would it?!"