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The Icon Bar: General: Experience with A9home?
 
  Experience with A9home?
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Eric Rucker Message #113608, posted by bhtooefr at 00:20, 7/3/2010, in reply to message #113605
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Posts: 337
Oh, don't get me wrong, you CAN play MP3s on a RiscPC. Pretty sure I'm using AMPlayer with DigitalCD right now, to play a 320 kbps 44 kHz stereo MP3 stream. wink

I'm just saying that the system gets seriously bogged down by the simple task of playing an MP3. I'm typing this post on my RiscPC running NetSurf right now, and it's just BARELY able to keep up with me doing the simple task of... typing into the text field.
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Soereboe Message #113610, posted by Soereboe at 03:32, 7/3/2010, in reply to message #113608
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Posts: 9
Sorry i got you wrong.. Yes i guess its not very multitasking with that kind of operations.
And going on the net with it would be a interesting experience. Im surfing OSX.
Because the limitations of the RISC OS at present, slow handling with MP3 etc,
is that because most of this stuff made in CISC? So its not very fair lol..
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Eric Rucker Message #113611, posted by bhtooefr at 05:12, 7/3/2010, in reply to message #113610
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Posts: 337
It has absolutely nothing to do with RISC vs. CISC.

It has everything to do with the limited CPU power of the RiscPC (even the 233 MHz StrongARM is far slower (before anyone flames me, yes, I know, RISC OS itself can be faster. I'm not talking about the OS, I'm talking about the raw number crunching power) than its contemporaries, the 233 MHz Pentium MMX and the 225 MHz PowerPC 603e,) and is compounded by the slow bus (16 MHz, 32-bit - 1/4 of the StrongARM's recommended bus speed) on the RiscPC.

Edit: And, of course, the StrongARM has no floating point unit, and MP3 playback is either very approximate, or floating point heavy code.

It's further compounded by RISC OS's cooperative multitasking - AMPlayer decides when it wants to give up the processor to other tasks, rather than RISC OS taking the CPU away from AMPlayer, and giving it to another app.

[Edited by bhtooefr at 05:24, 7/3/2010]
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Blind Moose Message #113614, posted by Acornut at 14:13, 7/3/2010, in reply to message #113431
Acornut No-eye-deer (No Idea)

Posts: 487
As I understand the A9home makes errors on HDD filesystems? This is realy scary! I use computers to process data. And if the A9home destroys them, this computer is useless.
I think that the only part of the harddrive that gets thrashed, is the !Boot directory. This is the part that gives problems. I certainly haven't lost any data from other areas.
I now routinely move the !Boot directory every few months, and the problem has not returned.
IMHO i'ts most likely, an inferior quality component harddrive, that is the problem.
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Chris Williams Message #113616, posted by diodesign at 16:38, 7/3/2010, in reply to message #113614
diodesign
The Opposition

Posts: 269
IMHO i'ts most likely, an inferior quality component harddrive, that is the problem.
No, I'm pretty sure it's a problem in the filing system stack. I wrote an advanced memory manager for the A9home (which featured things like swapping and on-demand memory allocation) that would thrash the hard disc when - say - force feeding Paint a massive spritefile, and I have never suffered any disc corruption.

The problem seems to be linked to certain third party applications that use a lot of disc - one of which once broke the filing system on my RiscPC hard disc nearly a decade ago.
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Paul Stewart Message #113638, posted by sa110_mk at 08:46, 10/3/2010, in reply to message #113337
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Posts: 144
USB keyboard and mouse doesn't have this issue. I use a Lenovo USB travel keyboard with built in touchpad and track point with my A9home. Works fine.
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Paul Stewart Message #113640, posted by sa110_mk at 08:57, 10/3/2010, in reply to message #113431
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Posts: 144
With regards to A9home file system errors. These have happend to me several times. Discknight luckily does fix them. As far as I know, Advantage 6 have not been able to replicate these errors in house and have only had handful of reports from users. So it would appear the vast majority of users do no suffer this issue.
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Rob Kendrick Message #113641, posted by nunfetishist at 08:57, 10/3/2010, in reply to message #113638
nunfetishist
Today's phish is trout a la creme.

Posts: 522
USB keyboard and mouse doesn't have this issue. I use a Lenovo USB travel keyboard with built in touchpad and track point with my A9home. Works fine.
USB keyboards on the A9 have their own slight issues, though; they don't work immediately at boot, for example.
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Paul Stewart Message #113642, posted by sa110_mk at 09:12, 10/3/2010, in reply to message #113614
Member
Posts: 144
I think that the only part of the harddrive that gets thrashed, is the !Boot directory. This is the part that gives problems. I certainly haven't lost any data from other areas.
I now routinely move the !Boot directory every few months, and the problem has not returned.
I can confirm this is not limited to the !Boot folder! I lost an entire folder of mpg files once. These were not in the !Boot folder. I have also recently had corruption in another folder that is not in !Boot.

Basically, back up your key folders on a regular basis.

Also it does not happen on a regular basis. The problem with the corruption is that it is hard to replicate. You can't say, do x, y and z to get the corruption, it does appear to be random. The only commonality I have found is applications that access the disk a lot. But again, using the same app to perform the same function does not always result in a file system error.

For me, I have moved my MPro and Newsbase across to my Virtual Acorn install. Since then I have encountered much less file system errors.

IMHO i'ts most likely, an inferior quality component harddrive, that is the problem.
Nothing to to with hdd. I've experience same issues when using both a compact flash card and a 2.5"SSD as the main drives.
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Paul Stewart Message #113643, posted by sa110_mk at 09:16, 10/3/2010, in reply to message #113641
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Posts: 144
USB keyboard and mouse doesn't have this issue. I use a Lenovo USB travel keyboard with built in touchpad and track point with my A9home. Works fine.
USB keyboards on the A9 have their own slight issues, though; they don't work immediately at boot, for example.
I entirely agree Rob. On more than one occasion when a file system error has struck !Boot, I have had to plug in a PS2 keyboard and Mouse, so I can bypass !Boot, reach the desktop and run Discknight.

What I meant from my comment above, is that under normal use, using a USB keyboard and Mouse, you don't have do things like unplug them and plug them back into different ports, unlike some PS2 devices.
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Peter Naulls Message #113653, posted by pnaulls at 16:53, 10/3/2010, in reply to message #113643
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Posts: 317

What I meant from my comment above, is that under normal use, using a USB keyboard and Mouse, you don't have do things like unplug them and plug them back into different ports, unlike some PS2 devices.
Really? Do you have a single example? PS/2 ports are assigned specific uses, so in general you can't swap them anyway.
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Rob Kendrick Message #113658, posted by nunfetishist at 21:33, 10/3/2010, in reply to message #113653
nunfetishist
Today's phish is trout a la creme.

Posts: 522
Really? Do you have a single example? PS/2 ports are assigned specific uses, so in general you can't swap them anyway.
Yes, the A9 Home. There is a bug in the PS/2 driver that means a race condition can be tickled with certain pairs of devices. Swapping them over sometimes solves this. PS/2 ports being tied to one of keyboard or mouse is entirely an OS problem, not a hardware one. RISC OS is quite happy to have the keyboard and mouse in any PS/2 socket.
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The Icon Bar: General: Experience with A9home?