CompuServe Thread

QB 5.0.4 buffer

4 messages in this thread
#66464From: Ged MurphyOct 18, 1993 3:53 PM
I'm using Quarterback 5.0.4 on my A2000+2630+8MB+GVPSCSIctrl with a Wangtek 5150 tape drive. I can't seem to set the buffer size to anything above 256K. The program seems to check only amount of chip-ram available even if I specify it should use Any memory. Even stranger, if I specify Any ram the program uses Fast-ram instead of the chip-memory even though it has checked whether enough chip-ram is available. Does anyone know of a solution to this ??? Ged Murphy on Autopilot ……Bonn,Germany
#66538From: New Horizons SoftwareOct 19, 1993 10:34 AM
Quarterback allocates its buffers from the 24bit DMA-able memory pool. On most machines with accelerators this ends up being chip ram. Also three times the figure that you set for the buffer size is required as we need three buffers that size. Quarterback will use any available memory to build its internal catalog that it uses to control the backup. On many disks this can be larger than the buffers.
#66716From: John GagerOct 21, 1993 8:09 PM
"Quarterback allocates its buffers from the 24bit DMA-able memory pool. On most machines with accelerators this ends up being chip ram." My question is why? Any technical reason that you can't set up Quarterback to use 32-bit memory as it's memory pool if its available? Quite a few of us have accelerator's or 4000's and running out of memory with a 16MB computer with a 512K buffer allocated seems a little screwy.
#66743From: Central Coast SoftwareOct 22, 1993 10:48 AM
John, Nearly all SCSI adaptors for the Amiga can only DMA to 24-bit memory (they were originally designed for the A-2000, which doesn't have 32-bit memory). Therefore, for compatibility's sake we made the "Any" memory option mean 24-bit memory. Unfortunately this means that if none of your expansion memory (i.e. "fast" memory) is in the 24-bit address space then it will allocate memory from the graphics (i.e. "chip") pool. Also, Quarterback 5.0 came out before the A-4000, so this wasn't a very big problem back then. The next version of Quarterback will have an option for "Any", "24-bit", or "Graphics" memory buffer allocation, where the "Any" option will allocate from memory above the 24-bit address space. However, it will be up to the user to make sure that their SCSI adaptor can DMA into this memory before they use this option. James Bayless Central Coast Software A division of New Horizons Software, Inc.