BlowUp/Videlity
Both works, but they have to run after MiNT, otherwise they'll cause all
sorts of trouble. If you have a MultiTOS-aware MiNT, just be sure that either
videlity.prg or blowboot.prg is located physically after MiNT in
the auto-folder. ATM. I don't know if N.AES even works without a MTOS-aware MiNT,
but if that is the case, be aware that this MiNT doesn't run anything located
after it in the auto-folder. You therefore have to run BlowUp/Videlity from mint.cnf.
Nova graphics card
N.AES works very well on a Nova, but there are some minor problems with the palette
in truecolour-modes with versions prior to 1.2.0. It's 100% perfect in 256 colours
though, and 1.2.0 also works perfectly in truecolour.
To cure some problems with the colours in previous versions, don't run programs
from n_aes.cnf but let the desktop autostart them instead.
Afterburner
N.AES works very well on the Afterburner, use the 040-version of FreeMiNT 1.15.x
for maximum speed. MiNTOS/N.AES also works fine with copyback-cache (makes your
Falcon about 20% faster on average), but beware that some applications (like GEMbench)
doesn't like copyback and can crash your system.
NB!Contrary to the docs it is important where 68882.prg
is placed in the autofolder. If must run after MiNT!
Useful utilities
Install Taskbar :-) I also highly recommend
a non-modal fileselector like Freedom 1.15 or Boxkite (2.0 or newer).
Beware that Freedom (all versions) are not particularly well implemented and can
cause problems (e.g. it doesn't work with memory-protection), but 1.15 has a brilliant
GUI and is well worth trying out.
Non-modal alerts
...is an excellent idea, unfortunelately all the implementations I've seen so
far hasn't been very good. If you really want non-modal alerts, use Freedom's
which are the best around. Do not use Newalert or Multidialog,
they make the whole system feel sluggish unless you have a Hades or Afterburner...
Changing priority
By giving the top application a higher priority, the system will get a "snappier"
feel without loosing the advantages of preemptive multitasking (this is partially
why MagiC feels so fast and MultiTOS so slow). There are a few programs that does
this, two of them are SpeedUp (included in the N.AES distribution.) by
Thomas Kuenneth and Maus-Window by Thomas Binder.
Both has their pros and cons: With SpeedUp you can assign priority- levels
to specific programs in the configuration-file, but Maus- Window also has the
ability to automatically top windows. I prefer Maus-Window (it feels like it
gives better performance than SpeedUp) but try them both before you decide what
to use.
Note! For some strange reason the PureC-editor gets very unresponsive
with both SpeedUp and Maus-Window! If you use PureC it's best to avoid those
programs completely.
Background printing with NVDI < 5
This is strictly speaking not limited to N.AES, it should work just as well with
any other AES as long as MiNT is present.
Thierry Bousch's lpdev installs u:\dev\lp, which is a interrupt-driven,
buffered Centronics-driver. Select this device in NVDI's "Drivers" CPX (Select
"file" and select "u:\dev\lp" in the fileselector).
When you now print, the program (e.g. Papyrus) will output everything in a
couple of seconds and then resume to normal operation. The device-driver will
now print the document entirely in the background and use virtually no CPU-time.
NB! This will ofcourse only work with programs that prints via GDOS!
lpdev's buffer is normally only 24Kb, if you print larger files than
this you won't benefit much from it. I've therefore compiled a version with
a 100Kb buffer, this is a more practical size.
For really large jobs it's easier to print to a normal file, and then output
this file in the background with...
cat file > /dev/lp &
You can also just drag the file to /dev/lp with Thing, but if the file
is large you'll block Thing until the print-job is finished. This won't lock other
tasks though.
NVDI5
NVDI has always been a excellent product, unfortunely the latest version (5) has
been "ASHified" a bit too much :-( It has lots of new functions, mainly dealing
with palettes, but for the first time is NVDI unstable... You can improve the
stability by installing the latest patches and updates from 2B,
but unless you have applications that use the new features in NVDI5 it's safest
to stick with 4.12.
Please note that while NVDI5 has it's own background-printing, this really
needs MagiC > 5 to work properly. It will work with MiNT/N.AES as well, but
it's a CPU-hog. The best solution would be to disable NVDI's background printing
and print to /dev/lp, but due to some stupid bug in NVDI (printing to a file
only works correctly under MagiC) this is not possible :-(
Updated 20012002