MorphOS Developer
Posts: 587 from 2003/2/24
From: finland, the l...
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vox wrote:
There were quite a lot WOS titles and utils, and that slight speed increase / less context switching has given it edge, no matter how much Phase 5 complained.
But WarpOS/WarpUP was a ugly mess, and frankly not faster than PowerUP when the programmer knew what they were doing. Context switch management was always manual tuning which had to be done to get best performance out of the dual CPU setup. No software could really fix that, programmer had to do the work. The best performing titles used tricks such as combining all the 68k calls into a single function executed once per frame, or even having non-cacheable memory areas to transmit data between CPUs so that cache flushes would not be required at all... Neither PowerUP or WarpOS/WarpUP really could do this automatically. There is no performance difference between the PowerUP and WarpOS/WarpUP, since the limitations are set by the hardware itself, not software.
What WarpOS/WarpUP had was a relentless dirt campaign against Phase5/PowerUP. It apparently worked quite well, by just seeing the number of people who still consider the false information a fact.
WarpOS/WarpUP had number of disadvantages: It had a non-standard binary formats, compilers and and tool, making it a technological dead-end. As it turns out, all work toward WarpOS/WarpUP was abandoned in the end.
On the other hand PowerUP lead to MorphOS, and PowerUP apps worked out of the box from the very first MorphOS release. This, in my opinion was the best vindication of the correct and sound design choices made with PowerUP.
There was clearly a division between the PowerUP and WarpOS/WarpUP "camps" back in the day. Interestingly these divisions were carried forward in the MorphOS and OS4 "camps" almost as-is.
I'll end this post with a classic quote that some might remember:
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ELF is a monster !!!