July MicroTimes
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Actually the text routines on the Atari are quick (not fast, but quick). You
can easily keep up with any reasonable (less than 2400 baud) transfer rate.
Of course to do this requires great masochism on the part of the programmer
(me). The GEM text routines are slow, the fast ones are hidden several
layers down and are only partially documented. The Amiga text routines are
also quick (still not fast) but they have several problems. First there is a
tremendous amount of overhead in outputing a single character, so you end up
doing what Jim did in StarTerm (and what I will be doing in my software),
printing the whole line in a single Text call. To be honest I don't think
either machine is very good at text output, but this is due to the bit mapped
screens. I sometimes wish they had a real "text" mode, but this would kill
the windows etc. (I guess we can't have everything.) Dan