Short: DMABlanker version 1.0 Copyright (C) 1994 By Viola Luca, Gianluca Marcoccia, Marco Menichetti CONTENTS OF THIS FILE: o DISCLAIMER o COPYRIGHT o SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS o INTRODUCTION o WHY SHOULD I USE DMABLANKER? o INSTALLATION o DESCRIPTION OF GUI o DESCRIPTION OF TOOLTYPES o KNOWN BUGS / BUG REPORTS -------------- * DISCLAIMER * -------------- The authors are neither responsible for any damage of any kind that this program could cause, nor for the suitability or accuracy of the documentation and the program. YOU ARE USING IT AT YOUR OWN RISK: Installing or using this software even once means having read and accepted this condition. ------------- * COPYRIGHT * ------------- This program is copyrighted by Viola Luca, Gianluca Marcoccia, Marco Menichetti. It is freely distributable but you CANNOT sell it or include it in commercial packages without the authors' authorization. A special exception is made for Fred Fish and the guys who manage the Aminet CD: they both can include this program in their software compilations without any authorization. Please spread always the full archive distribution, which must contain the following files/directories: DMAblanker 8068 bytes DMABlanker.info 1451 bytes DMAblankerENG.doc 8905 bytes DMAblankerITA.doc 9655 bytes MagicWB/DMAblanker.info 1955 bytes ---------------- * REQUIREMENTS * ---------------- There are no particular requirements to use DMAblanker: it should run on any Amiga with OS. 2.0 and superior. ---------------- * INTRODUCTION * ---------------- Yet another blanker? Yes, but this has some particular features. It will neither show you amazing effects on screen, nor will play animations or sounds (wasting CPU time and CHIP memory:). This blanker will do what a screenblanker is supposed to do: preserve the phosphores of your monitor and save cpu time, by disabling the DMA channels of the Amiga's custom chips. These chips, infact, expecially when you have big resolutions and many colors on screen, waste a lot of CPU time: on the Amiga, the 680x0 CPUs don't have full access to CHIP ram but they must share it with coprocessors. The more bandwidth coprocessors need, the more the CPU has to wait before accessing chip RAM, the more the system's performance will degrade. -------------------------------- * WHY SHOULD I USE DMABLANKER? * -------------------------------- DMAblanker is very helpful in all the situations that force you to leave the computer switched on for a lot of time to run programs: for example you might want to run a BBS or render some heavy 3D projects, and so on. Disabling the DMA channels will give a bit more horsepower to your application, running while you are not at the keyboard, saving time. In particular it is very useful for BBSes: imagine for example that a remote user has choosen a 16-colors ANSI screen to connect with you, and that your BBS software opens in locale mode an IDENTICAL screen for monitoring the user: if your BBS is running on an ECS Amiga opening a 16-colors screen will overload the system, and the users will not be able to download (or upload) at full speed. But if you are not interested in monitoring the user, when you are not at the keyboard the DMAblanker will disable the video DMA, dropping the cpu overload. (The situation described is a REAL one, as happened to one of the authors, who had to babysit a BBS). ---------------- * INSTALLATION * ---------------- DMABlanker is very easy to install: just unpack the archive and copy DMABlanker and DMABlanker.info into the directory you want to put them. REMEMBER TO COPY THE .INFO TOO, because the program will take from the icon (via tool-types) the parameters it needs. Included there are 2 icons: one for Magic Worbench and one for normal workbench. ---------------------- * DESCRIPTION OF GUI * ---------------------- DMABlanker is a commodity with a font-adaptive GUI (it uses the system fonts selected by user). Because of this it is fully Exchange compatible. The Graphical User Interface of DMAblanker looks like the following: ---------- Times Setting -------- | ------------- | | Timeout: | 60 | | | ------------- | --------------------------------- ---------- DMA Switches --------- | | | - - | | BltPri: | | Disk: |#| | | - - | | - - | | Playfields: | | Audio3: | | | | - - | | - - | | Copper: | | Audio2: | | | | - - | | - - | | Blitter: |#| Audio1: | | | | - - | | - - | | Sprites: | | Audio0: | | | | - - | | | --------------------------------- In the "Times Settings" group we have only the Timeout gadget, which specifies how much time the blanker will wait before blanking. In the "DMA Switches" group we have the coprocessors checkbox gadgets: if checked, the corresponding DMA channels will be disabled during blanking. The Blitter and Disk DMA are NOT selectable because they are used by the OS; anyway the corresponding gadgets are included for future revisions of DMA Blanker. From the GUI window you have access to a menu named "Project" which has the following items: Hide Hides the interface ( hitting the CloseWindow gadget has the same effect ). About.. Shows copyright informations Quit Exits from DMAblanker and removes it The meaning of the DMA Switches is the following: BltPri Toggles blitter priority over CPU Playfields Enables/Disables bitplanes DMA Copper Enables/Disables copper DMA Blitter Always set ON, it is the blitter DMA (used by OS) Sprites Enables/Disables sprites DMA Disk Always set ON, it is the disk DMA (used by OS) Audio3 Enables/Disables the audio channel 3 DMA (*) Audio2 " " " " " 2 " Audio1 " " " " " 1 " Audio0 " " " " " 0 " (*) If you have an application playing sound in background, disabling the audio channels DMA might cause some noise in the speakers. It is not a bug: it is due to the fact that DMAblanker disables the DMA channels at every video interrupt, but the sound playing application might restore the audio DMA thereafter. ---------------------------- * DESCRIPTION OF TOOLTYPES * ---------------------------- When launched from Workbench, DMABlanker will read its configuration with tooltypes. If launched from CLI/SHELL, it will use its built-in default values. The tooltypes used are the following: CX_POPUP = YES | NO Put YES to pop the interface up when you run the program the first time. (defaults to YES) CX_POPKEY = These are the keys you must press to make the interface pop up. (defaults to "rawkey ctrl alt d") CX_PRIORITY = 0..127 The commodity's priority in the commodities network. (defaults to 0) TIMEOUT = 0..65535 Specifies the time to wait before blanking, in seconds. (defaults to 60) COPPER = ACTIVE | INACTIVE (copper DMA) BLTPRI = ACTIVE | INACTIVE (Blitter over CPU priority) SPRITES = ACTIVE | INACTIVE (Sprites DMA) PLAYFLD = ACTIVE | INACTIVE (Bitplanes DMA) AUDIO3 = ACTIVE | INACTIVE (audio channel 3 DMA) AUDIO2 = ACTIVE | INACTIVE (audio channel 2 DMA) AUDIO1 = ACTIVE | INACTIVE (audio channel 1 DMA) AUDIO0 = ACTIVE | INACTIVE (audio channel 0 DMA) These tooltypes specify what DMA channels will be left enabled (ACTIVE) or will be disabled (INACTIVE) at blank time. They all default to INACTIVE. DONOTWAIT It prevents the WorkBench to wait for DMAblanker to finish, if it has been launched at workbench startup time from the SYS:WBstartup drawer. ---------------------------- * KNOWN BUGS / BUG REPORTS * ---------------------------- There are no known bugs. The program has been tested on a stock Amiga 4000/040 and on a Amiga 2000 with GVP 68030 accelerator and OS 2.1. If you notice some problems or want to suggest improvements feel free to contact the authors at the following e-mail addresses, specifying the type of trouble, the hardware configuration and possibly if there were other applications in background. viola@freenet.hut.fi marcocci@cli.di.unipi.it or via "snail mail": Viola Luca Corso Italia 52 95047 Paterno' (CT) ITALY SICILY Marcoccia Gianluca Via Garibaldi 78 56100 Pisa (PI) ITALY Menichetti Marco Via Monteverdi 4 50144 Firenze (FI) ITALY Warp Engine 040@40Mhz accelerators, Picasso II gfx cards, 1 Gig Hard disks, beautiful sisters are WELCOME! :)))