From: Milan WWW Pikula <www@terminus.sk>
To: <agenda-dev@lists.agendacomputing.com>
Subject: [agenda-dev] 16M ram - consequences
List-Archive: <http://lists.agendacomputing.com/pipermail/agenda-dev/>
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2002 19:36:56 +0100 (CET)

Hi,

	I've been playing with my 16M-ram Agenda, and
have some things to share with you:

1) -3 megs of ram = +9 megs of flash and an amazing speed improvement

	Having plenty of RAM, I unXIPed everything on my romdisk.

At first, I saved 3 megabytes of space on flash, which means ~9 megs of
uncompressed binaries.

What about speed improvement? Well.. remember those times when we moved
to SDRAM kernel + snow? This is something similiar!
The keyboard app switches the modes instantly (no more waiting for drawings,
which makes it finally usable). My ti85 emulator reacts like the real TI.
The application launch time is much shorter for most of the apps
(which is VERY good on PDA - for example).. And Aliens (probably the most
accelerated app) are hardly playable. The 'monitor' app says 1.96% cpu
instead of 3.92-5.88% (values taken at the same conditions with xipped
and non-xipped libs).

And memory? libc + important X libraries, which have to be available any
time, took only ~2 megs of memory. There is still plenty of RAM available.

2) vrflash...

	Because of the modification of PMON i've made (it detects
less RAM than 'official' version) it is needed to patch a vrflash to
flash bigger files. I uploaded the patch, as well as pmon and 2 versions
of my current romdisk, to my page, http://www.terminus.sk/~www/agenda/ .

3) future.

	well, I've got a great speed, flash-space and memory improvement
(2x faster application startup and various run-time speedups, 9 megs for
binaries and at least 6 MB of RAM) only by adding 8 MB of RAM. This looks
like a way for AgendaComputing to get some customers - even if they'd have to
manufacture this in Germany. I'll suggest them to try this, together with
"free" upgrade for the current owners.

	I personally have some spare RAM chips (few of them from Alexander
Oelzant, few from my own sources;), so if someone of you wants to
get 16Megs, you can either ask for some chips (I am not sure about their
functionality, though), or send me your Agenda and I'll do the upgrade
for free. BUT:

	- there is NO WARRANTY. I promise I will do my best, but I want you
	  to understand, that if I destroy your Agenda, I cannot pay you
	  any amount or money or something. It's up to you to take the risk.
	(on the other hand, I've made 2 pieces of 16M agenda, have soldered
          ~15 chips to my own agenda during the process and it still lives;
          and in the worst case, I will post you a burned hardware back, so
          you can try to repair it somewhere/somehow).
	- I live in Europe, so I'd like you to pay the mail costs.
	- I have only limited number of RAM circuits and spare time, thus
	  I don't guarantee I will accept your Agenda.

	If you agree with this, contact me privately to get more details.

Enough for now,

	Milan

--
Milan Pikula, WWW. Finger me for Geek Code.
http://fornax.elf.stuba.sk/~www, www@fornax.elf.stuba.sk
.. dajte mi pevnu linku a pohnem zemegulou ..



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