CompuServe Messages

Regarding this virtual memory discussion, I certainly look forward to AmigaDOS support, but there is another option that will probably make much more sense for most Amiga users. As a 3D product developer, I encounter dozens of people (customers) with systems much better than my own: i.e., eight megs, '030 boards, monster hard disks. They have all the memory for 3D programs, which use it to hold data structures related to 3D modeling and rendering. (I can think of so very few applications that would need virtual memory for code space, as opposed to data space.) In most cases, the majority of the 8 meg is simply used to hold a data structure that describes the points and polygons of the objects in the 3D scene. In other words, these programs have things in memory that they don't need. There is a path not taken by any of today's 3D programs. They could implement their own virtual memory system for the data structures that could really benefit from it. This is more common on the IBM PC, where there are 64K limitations on addressing. Instead of demanding and hogging expansion memory, the application could use any hard disk to swap out the data that it doesn't need. It's not a difficult programming task, it's just something that Amiga developers have been lazy about.