CompuServe Messages

Larry, I typically run only two 3DS process at once. But right now, I'm running three. One is a multi-day rendering job that has been chugging along all day. The other is a test-flic render that should take only 10 min. Finally, my interacive session with the vibrant s3 driver is running too. Only two sessions are doing anything while I'm typing this, and if OS/2 would let the 3DS Session that's using the s3 driver run in the background, I'd have only two going now. The only reason I ever run two cpu-bound things at once is if I need one of them done now and don't want to take the time to interrupt the other one. I wish I new how to suspend taks in OS/2 and how to set priorities, if that's possible. I haven't varified that slave processes free their memory. 3DS doesn't in interactive mode, so I guess they probably don't. I do know that Aniplay immediately tries to allocate DPMI_MAXMEM bytes of memory when you start it up. This is a real drag when I forget and run it in a session where DPMI_MAXMEM is 64MB (I have a 32MB system). The current issue of Byte has an article about OS/2 SMP. They say it is in testing now and will be released in 1Q 94. IBM (Ambra) is selling a nice cheap Pentium EISA tower system that you can add a second CPU too. This would make a killer 3DS station with a slave process for each CPU and an interactive process in the forground. I scratched OS/2 2.0 because it didn't support my SVGA card (Speedstar 24X). I think IBM really shot themselves in the foot with the poor device support in 2.0. Bailey