erratic screen updates (was Slow screen lock/unlock)

[Malte Brill]

Hi Michael,

have you tried it outside the IDE? Make a standalone of the stack and 
see what happens. Maybe it will also look different in the player. When 
I worked on the first version of libRMC I also thought I couldn´t get 
smooth animations done (on slower machines). But as soon as I made a 
standalone it worked perfectly on my machine (a slow G4). I found that 
graphic cards with low video RAM could become a bottleneck, that is 
hard to deal with. So I ended up setting the minimal system 
requirements for my apps. rather high. (Computer with >600 MHz and at 
least 64 MB video Ram 512 MB Ram for OsX. 400 MHz 64 MB video Ram 512 
MB Ram for Os 9. 800 MHz 64 MB video Ram 512 MB Ram for XP) Animation 
is always a problem on slower or badly configured machines.

I can´t run flash fmovies under X either (on my G4-400) ,even though 
flash movies work good under 9.

Now if I only could find a way to test if this requirements are 
fulfilled on the current machine. I guess on OsX/ *nix (and maybe XP) 
one could shell it out. Anyone an idea how to go about this?

  I *guess* all required info (on OsX) is in shell(dmesg) but I don´t 
know if it is consistantly formatted, to allow easy extraction of the 
data...

If one extracts the required info it would be possible to display a 
warning like:

Your computer might be too slow/have not enough RAM/Have a too small 
video-card to run this stack.

Cheers,

Malte

 >If you run it you may find, as I do, that it is plenty fast enough in
 >bursts, but the rate is erratic, with some cycles as much as 6 times
 >slower than the average. Overall it works in a disappointing way.

 >This has been interesting, but at the end I still have to say that I
 >haven't found a way to get smooth animation rates. The calculations
 >are fast enough and the screen updates are fast enough most of the
 >time, but every second or so there are a few slow cycles and that
 >makes any animation jerky and horrible.