4 Nov
2007
4 Nov
'07
10:58 p.m.
On 4 Nov 2007 at 22:41, Atsushi Takahashi wrote:
Old PCs and in fact new PCs often drop characters when
doing Hex Dumps,
for example. The faster the CPU, the fewer dropped characters,
obviously... I see the value of using dedicated terminal hardware.
Certainly true if you're using an 8250 UART chip. Replacing it with
a 16550 and making sure that your software enables the FIFO can help
quite a bit.
And there were/are high-performance serial cards with large buffers.
Names escape me at the moment, but they were popular with some BBS
sysops.
One thing that used to hurt a lot with old PCs and graphics cards was
the way that software implemented scrolling--by performing block
moves on the display buffer contents. Write your own screen handling
software to manage the same thing by changing the starting display
address instead if the display adapter that you're using doesn't have
a scrolling feature.
Really, there's no reason that a PC should lag behind a 1980's
terminal that used a lowly 4MHz Z80.
Cheers,
Chuck