CompuServe Messages

Your dealer is confusing apples with oranges. A program does not have to "ask" for the extra speed: the extra speed is there and the program will run at that speed. On the other hand, if you have an arithmetic coprocessor installed, programs will not make use of it unless they were written with the coprocessor in mind; so in that particular sense the program does have to "ask." A program that was not written to make use of such a coprocessor, and makes a lot of floating point calculations, will still run faster on an accelerated machine than a stock A1000; it just won't run as fast as it could if the additional support was written into the program. As for games, music, and other timing-dependent programs, if they followed the rules and good programming practices they will run at the right speed because they don't derive their timing from the CPU clock speed. So objects that have to move onscreen, etc., will still function properly. On the other hand, many games will not function on the A3000 because they broke various system programming rules in the interest of enhancing their features in various ways, and new versions have to be written to work on that platform. Pete