More Chipram

[Thomas]

I find it funny how people try to create the theory of "chip memory that cannot be accessed by the custom chips".

The definition of chip memory is "memory that can be accessed by the custom chips". That's what its name comes from and that's the only pupose why it exists.

"Chip memory which cannot be accessed by the custom chips" cannot exist simply because it is the opposite of the definition of chip memory.

It's also quite simple to understand that the currently existing custom chips are designed and built to access not more than 2MB of memory. People not knowing the technical internals of the chips just have to believe it, but it is a fact. All existing chips cannot access more than 2MB of memory. In order to have the custom chips access more than 2MB of memory, you have to build new chips.

That's what WinUAE's authors did. They built new chips. It's easy to do if the entire machine is built in software. But for a real (hardware) Amiga it would mean to develop an entire new set of custom chips. And motherboards.

And I fully agree with Zac67 that people saying to keep away technical facts from a technical discussion should deal with theology or philosophy but please keep away from computers and mathematics.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

if you are trying to load a whole bunch of programs that are all asking for chip ram you dont care if the custom chips use it.

That's what is so entertaining about it. A memory area can either be declared as chip RAM or not. If it is declared as chip RAM, it is expected to be accessed by the chips. If a program allocates chip memory it expects the chips to be able to access this memory. If the chips cannot access it, the program will crash or create corruption.

You certainly can fake chip memory in any memory area, just by declaring this area as chip memory. You don't need new chips or anything.  The OS will at once start to use it for bitmaps, sounds, floppy disk caches etc.
And will immediately crash. Because the chips which are told to access this area, can't. They just cut off the upper bits of the address and overwrite areas in (real) chip memory instead.

If you have programs which allocate chip memory although they could use any memory instead, you should rather patch these programs instead of trying to argue about non-exitant (or should I say impossible) hardware features. If a program allocates chip memory although it does not need it, the program is buggy, not the hardware bad. And the programs mentioned above surely need chip memory because they use the chips to do something with this memory. So they don't run with faked chip memory.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

Yes, it is arrogant and it is arrogant for a good reason. You just don't want to understand. There are about 120 postings in this thread and in every second posting Piru repeats that chip memory is chip memory for a reason and programs allocate chip memory for that reason. Things allocated in chip memory belong into chip memory. Things allocated in chip memory belong into chip memory because the chips need access to it. You cannot define fake chip memory because the custom chips don't have access to faked chip memory. You cannot define chip memory outside of the address space of the custom chips because memory outside of the address space of the custom chips is no chip memory.

if i had 2megs chip and some "chip" all the stuff the custom chips need: screens stensil etc could concevably fit in the 2megs with the program that is requesting chip ram going into "chip" and still working. dpaint is modular so if you use a function like 3d rotations and stuff it loads that into ram. if it needs chip it could possibly use "chip"

So what is the difference between '"chip"' and 'fast' ? If anything DPaint allocates in 'chip' could go into '"chip"', why shouldn't it go into 'fast' ? The only difference between 'chip' and 'fast' is that 'fast' cannot be accessed by the custom chip. So what is the difference between '"chip"' and 'fast' ?

DPaint allocates as much as possible into 'fast'. Everything else goes into 'chip'. Neither 'fast' nor '"chip"' will do, it needs to be 'chip'. Because the custom chips need to access it.

You give screens, stencils, animation controls etc. as examples. These are all either displayed (which needs 'chip', not '"chip"') or ready to be copied into the graphics buffer (using the Blitter which is a custom chip which needs 'chip', not '"chip"').

I don't get your point. There is either chip memory or non-chip memory. You cannot have "chip memory that is no chip memory". (Remember: chip memory is the memory accessible by the custom chips.)

Bye,
Thomas