Savel brain dump in English!

Long time ago all my computer were suffering from low memory. I always remember how my work computer lagged when I loaded bigger application and how that virtual memory was chewing harddisk. Especially when I loaded few programs at same time like in my home Amiga computer. Now I am trying to put as much RAM as I can.

All recent software and OS are very memory hungry beasts. But optimizing Windows I reduced memory usage. Now I need only ~150megs to run XP Pro. I don’t like bells and whistles- I kill all pop-up and useless software. Look at your Windows computer lower right corner. All these fancy icons are using RAM and your CPU power. Are they important?

My computer had 1.5Gb of RAM. Today I upgraded 2 DDR2 modules from 256 to 512. Now my computer mainboard is populated with 4 pcs of 512Mb DDR2 RAM modules. 1.5 gigs was enough for my work. In fact, I never filled all the RAM, but my windozeXP complained few time that it is low of virtual RAM (I manually set the size of virtual RAM). Microsoft can’t write programs working without virtual RAM

Here is the screenshot of task manager:

As you see, my computer is optimised for low RAM and CPU load. I stopped all shitty popup software and unused windows services.

Here is my first computer… In fact it is not the same computer I had, as I sold mine for big money and bought cool computer Amiga 500. But this blog post is not about Amiga, but about my old Atari.

Atari 65XE is younger version of Atari 800. It was second attempt of Atari and Warner Bros. to make money from old 8 bit technology. The computer was popular and was sold in eastern Europe (soviet block) countries. The technology is newer than in old 800 and 65XE was easily converted to 128kb version Atari 130XE. Especially last versions with 4 DRAM chips.

Atari 65XE is based on 6502 CPU running ant 1.8MHz. Computer has 24kb or ROM with OS and BASIC and 64kb of RAM. All RAM, ROM, custom graphics, peripheral and other chips were located in same address space. It is possible to switch off the ROM, so RAM available for user can be increased.

The computer has more custom chips than ZX Spectrum. These customs chips made this computer impossible to clone using simple TTL logic. Some chips were debugged- FREDDY (MMU) chip was cloned and updated to handle even more RAM.

Main advantage against ZX Spectrum is, that computer has GPU (graphics processor) and hardware sprites. Also, it has more advanced audio hardware than original speccy. The audio is 4 independent audio synthesizers. GPU has only 2 commands, but it makes some interesting video effects. Like changing the screen resolution on same scree and also it allows to change color palette on every scanline. This introduced HAM (hold and modify) mode, more expanded in Amiga computer.

Such GPU reduce CPU load and RAM needed to game. The original 2600 game system used similar hardware and it was running game without RAM! (There is only ten or twenty bytes of RAM- bytes, not kilobytes.)

I was using this computer about 20 years ago and I forgot all the tricks. So the testing software for my friend Znaika is only in text mode. It is running in GRAPHICS 0 mode. It is hardware only, text mode and the text is changing very fast.

Also, I build AIO2PC (SIO2PC) interface for this computer and mine P4 with all it’s 3GHz is working as slave for atari and emulating floppy drive. I downloaded ALL games available for this computer and put in one folder. (Warez!)

In one company, the security situation is awful and we decided to install security video and record everything. As the facility is quite complicated, we squeezed only to 8 video cameras. In Lithuania you can buy various video in devices, but when you need 8 channels or more, the assortment is quite small. I selected quite expensive, h.264 standard (MPEG-4 part 10), hardware compression video capture card. It is VG8C-RT4:

The main peculiarity of the card is that it has two Texas Instruments DSPs on board (digital signal processor). The DSP is converting and compressing video, so main computer CPU is not loaded. All free computing power could be used for other interesting purposes.

The computer itself is new too. Maybe it is too powerful for this purpose, but I selected Intel Pentium 4 Duo core, 2.6GHz, 1Gb RAM and SATA hard disk. As I bought computer without any other bells and whistles, without CD/DVD/FD/Monitor, the price is much lower compared to video capture card. Also I selected Intel made, Intel chipset mainboard with extended warranty. I hope, that this computer will do it’s job for a quite long time.

Here is the first tests. I need to get familiarized with unknown hardware and software to me. I don’t have so many video sources at home, so I only used 4 channels. I used 3 video cameras’ and one video output from TV set.

Four channels in full-screen mode look quite impressive.