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Convert Unneeded VRAM Into A Storage Device
Pawel Kot writes "Have you ever thought why does your graphics card has so much memory? Do You think you have not enough RAM or awfully slow swap file? Do you need fast ram-disk or diskless machine? Go for it! Take one of these cheap 128MB graphics cards and enjoy the speed. Michal Schulz wrote a good description on how to take the advantage of not used video card memory."
Bwahahahahahaha!
[Of course it's client-server; it runs on a LAN]
Isn't this a bit wasteful? I mean you can buy 128mb of memory for a LOT cheaper than one of those "ultra cheap 128mb graphics cards".
I'll stick with buying RAM and using my graphics card for what it was designed for. Besides...this only applies to X users anyway.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
I want to have sex with Pampers 6 on me oh yeah that makes me happy
If you're THAT low on memory, you're not likely to have a 128 meg video card.
Or a 64 meg card, even.
-l
Shove your video RAM up your stinking cornholes, you fat ugly hippies
Cool! Finally I have somewhere to store my Quake 3 savegames - on the spare memory of my laptop's 16meg graphics card!
Or maybe not...
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
I think on a megabyte to megabyte basis, RAM is far cheaper than VRAM. This has a high coolness factor, but a very low usefulness factor. Unless all your memory slots are broken (like the ones in my old mothrboard)
Help I'm a rock.
fp
If you HAVE a new 128 mb video card (which isn't that cheap!), you probably also have a fast processor and motherboard, and lots of memory anyway.
I strongly doubt you would buy a fast processor with an agp motherboard (needed for the card), and desperately needed memory so badly, that you take from the 128 mb video card.
is it just me, but as i was trying to decipher the english in the post, i could just hear him saying, "Hi, have you ever thought why does your graphic card has so much memory?"
i usually could care, but this post reads like ghetto yoda.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
...How to use that "cheap" P4 as a, err, inexpensive coffee warmer.
Have you ever thought why is your grammar so bad? Do you think you have not enough school or awfully slow mind? Do Slashdot need better editing?
Have you ever thought why does your graphics card has so much memory?
No, I haven't. That's probably because I think in proper English. "Why does your graphics card has so much..."
How 'bout this? "Have you ever thought, 'why does my graphics card have so much memory?'"
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
.pl is POLAND. it's full of POLES. they don't speak ENGLISH in POLAND. (.pl is also PERL LIBRARY which is used in SHITTY WEBSITES like SLASHDOT to enable increased ASS FINGERING by SMELLY LINUX HIPPIES!)
From the article, (slightly modified). My karma is capped anyway, so...
/dev/mtdblock0 /dev/mtdblock0
:)
What the hell can I do with that?
Well, many things. When I was thinking about it, I have found two ways to use it. One of them is making any filesystem on that and mounting it somewhere, the other is more sophisticated:
meehow:~# mkswap
meehow:~# swapon
Later on, more possibilities occur. You can use this methon in X11 terminals, to limit network bandwitch for example. During bootup such terminal would load kernel and compressed filesystem. The FS may be placed then on such mtdblock device and kernel may boot from it. Using console-only server with some kind of modern 32MB gfx card may use the vram as huge swap (which is way faster than swap on disk). New ideas are welcome
So what if it's cheaper to buy ram, or that it's not effecient or what not. Half the hacks posted on Slashdot tend to be next to useless anyways.
It's a cool hack, simple as that.
Watching the new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie last night brought so many emotions to me: joy, for seeing my favorite characters brought to the small screen once again; skepticism, in trying to believe these are the same characters as their original counterparts; and a sense of being overwhelmed, by the sheer number of revelations and surprises Mattel and Mike Young Productions managed to pack into an hour and a half of television.
Truly this is an historic moment for He-Fans everywhere. No longer is our favorite childhood hero banished to a one-time existence in the mid-1980s. Now it has been revived in a refreshing and powerful new series and toyline. Now our He-Man will take his place among the ranks of G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Wars, and other franchise creations that have permanent appeal over many generations. What the new cartoon proves more than anything is that the concept for Masters of the Universe is timeless.
"The Beginning," which will be split into three "Origin" parts for regular airing, aspires to do something never before attempted in the Masters of the Universe canon. The original cartoon (and toyline) begin during He-Man's heroic career, never explaining how he got the sword or how his rivalry with Skeletor developed. Instead, we were fed constant hints as to how these things happened (Sorceress was assigned the job of giving the swords to their destined owners in "Origin of the Sorceress"), but never truly told the straight story on how a cowardly prince became the champion of Eternia. Mattel and Mike Young Productions have chosen not only to finally tell He-Man's origin story, but Skeletor's as well, interlocking the two permanently.
Skeletor's origin story still leaves many questions to be answered. The writers have chosen to use the Keldor tale first popularized in the 1986 series Mattel mini-comic, "The Search for Keldor!," which insinuated that Skeletor was King Randor's long-lost brother. Whether or not they are siblings remains a question mark, but what we do know is that Skeletor was once known as a goatee-sporting villain named Keldor (and goatees are always a sure sign of evil, right?). By the way Randor warns the Elders in the Hall of Wisdom, we understand that Skeletor and his army are fast approaching, threatening and invading every corner of Eternia. It is apparent that Randor and the Defenders (the new title of the Heroic Warriors that shows they are constantly on the defense against Skeletor) are struggling to keep the planet safe. While Mattel has chosen to show how Skeletor got his skullface, they have left the story of how Skeletor became Eternia's chief enemy up to question. This leaves all sorts of room for Hordak, King Hiss, and any number of threads to weave into Skeletor's past. But at this point in his life, Skeletor seems to have asserted his rightful place as Eternia's resident master of destruction and created a loyal band of warriors to fight his cause. When Skeletor and his forces attack the Hall of Wisdom, a clash with Randor leaves Skeletor faceless. When Skeletor tosses a vial of poison at Randor, he deflects it with his shield, and the poison sprays all over Keldor's face. The animators try so hard to make this a "Big, Important Moment" that they use dreadfully sluggish slow motion to It is thrilling to finally see Skeletor clutching his head screaming, "My face! My face!," and it is even more satisfying to know that Randor caused the deformation. If there was not hatred between these two before, there definitely is now. Mattel has worked hard to incorporate Randor more tightly into the He-Man/Skeletor rivalry and give Skeletor real motivation to detest the king of Eternia.
Another longtime hole in Skeletor's story has been how Eternia fought him all those twenty years while waiting for Adam to grow up and assume the powers of Grayskull. There have been many theories as to how this might be explained, but Mike Young Productions has come up with the best one I've heard yet. The Council of Elders banished Skeletor and his gang to Snake Mountain (in the "Dark Hemisphere," perpetuating the idea that Eternia has a dark half and a light half). The Sorceress and Man-At-Arms generated a mystic wall to imprison the villains in their own sub-world. This is the cartoon's first symbolic union of science and magic, as Man-At-Arms thrusts a generator into the ground and the Sorceress ignites it with her magic power. This is the first time in either cartoon series that the Sorceress has really performed a jaw-dropping magic spell. The shots of the mystic wall are breath-taking, and we understand immediately that this Sorceress will be a force to reckon with.
Unfortunately, the Sorceress is a failure. Gone is the maternity and soft-spoken spirituality of a kind-hearted woman in bird costume. She has been replaced by a female Egyptian pharaoh that speaks cold declarations and looks with hard eyes. I always imagined the scene when the Sorceress bestows the sword upon Prince Adam to be a beautiful, loving scene where the Sorceress would gently explain Adam's destiny as he, overwhelmed but fully aware of the moment's importance, dutifully accepted his new role. All hopes for such a moment are dashed by the icy Sorceress and frightfully bratty Prince Adam seen in "The Beginning."
Mattel has decided to make Prince Adam a boy and He-Man a man, which is a decision I very much approve. Michael Halperin, who wrote the original He-Man series bible, wanted Adam to be a teenager given the power to fight like a man, but Filmation nixed the idea in order to make He-Man and Prince Adam the exact same size and build to ease the difficulties of animating them. The new Adam provides endless avenues for personal growth and development. I think the writers chose to make Adam so unlikable in this first episode so that he would have some place to go and room to grow as the series fleshes him out. He certainly has the most potential of any of the characters in a series where the villain is usually the star. Adam's new look is a breath of fresh air, finally freeing him from that gaudy pink vest and giving him a look that crosses somewhere between Robin Hood and a punk rocker. The new story is more a fairy tale about how a child assumes the power to defeat bigger and stronger enemies, following classic myth-making principles.
But while writer Dean Stefan's decision to make Adam bratty now so he can become manly later is probably a smart one, it makes Adam's performance particularly hard to swallow. He jokes, chides, and ridicules the most important moments of his life, making him appear flippant and disrespectful. As soon as he meets the Sorceress, he makes a crack about sending her a birthday invitation (the guardian's silent response is the only moment when her frosty coldness truly works). Adam possesses reverence for almost nothing--his warrior training, his duties as a prince, his destiny as revealed in the legendary Castle Grayskull. Whereas his attitude in the old show was purely an act, this Prince Adam really does behave like this. It will be most interesting to see if, as Adam grows and accepts his challenges over time, he will grow out of his childishness and learn to act foolish only as a disguise for his secret identity. As told in "The Beginning," He-Man is merely a muscular costume for Prince Adam. Our hero is developed only minimally and possesses no life of his own. I always enjoyed in the old show how you could never really separate He-Man from Adam and vice versa--because even though Adam's behavior was all an act, his inner self was completely formed from the principles and strength of He-Man. One could not exist without the other, but there are times when Adam tires of being He-Man ("Into the Abyss") or outright gives him up ("The Problem With Power"). The writers for the new series seem to be going with the idea that Adam is the whole person and He-Man exists as an incidental, alternative form. If the writers are smart, they'll begin blending the two as the heroics of He-Man begin to have a maturing effect on Prince Adam. The new series promises us huge character development stories for Prince Adam, allowing us to fully understand the growing pains of suddenly becoming your planet's crowned champion.
Writer Dean Stefan produces an unexpected twist in the revelation scene at Grayskull when Adam completely walks out of it, mid-ceremony. Man-At-Arms, having known Adam's destiny all along (he and the Sorceress share a lot of secrets, don't they?), takes Adam to Castle Grayskull when he realizes the time has come. Adam hardly takes any of this seriously, which is a real shame. While I understand what the writers are trying to do, Adam's behavior subtracts not only from our love for him but also from the mystique of Castle Grayskull. If a teenage brat will not shut up when he enters Grayskull just from the feeling of being overwhelmed, then, well, he's a real brat. Adam's nonchalant attitude explodes when he declares, "I'm no great warrior. I'm just a kid. Thanks for the magic show," flagrantly refusing the Sorceress' offer. He flies back to the Royal Palace, where Skeletor and his minions have already wrecked havoc. Suddenly realizing that his family is in danger, Adam understands why he was asked to become a hero at this point in time. Some of Adam's behavior can be explained by his sheltered childhood lived in the safety of the Royal Palace. As Adam asks in his first scene, "What forces of evil? . . . They're history." He has never known evil, so how could he not have a carefree attitude about all this? By making Adam leave Grayskull prematurely, the writers force Adam to choose his destiny rather than have it simply bestowed upon him. Seeing the Palace in ruin, watching Man-At-Arms, his protector, jet off to the Evergreen Forest to join the fighting, hearing the words of his distraught mother, Adam has no choice but to return to Castle Grayskull and accept his adulthood. This plot twist allows Adam the power of choice and strengthens his character, even if it eschews the respectful scene I had always imagined in my head.
The problem with Adam's flippant attitude is that it belittles Grayskull in its very first scene, when it should feel the most powerful and grandiose. The director has chosen low angle and surveillance shots to give us a wide perspective on Castle Grayskull, mostly to make Adam feel small and lost in its expansiveness. The newly redesigned Castle Grayskull is another major weak point in Mattel's re-imagining of the old series. Rather than being a castle obscured by a twisting and elaborate Evergreen Forest, the new Grayskull is a vertical tower stuck in the middle of a jungle. It makes more sense now why no one could find Grayskull before, but that does not make for its frighteningly vertical design. Trying to better Filmation's Grayskull was a fruitless task from the beginning, since Castle Grayskull stands as the original He-Man's only true work of art. The huge jaw mouth, the deep, penetrating eye sockets, the animal-like body of the castle, its leg-like bones supporting its weight over the bottomless abyss, the organic green interior--how could the animators of today even begin to top all this? They don't even try. The new Castle Grayskull looks like any other stone castle with a skullface slapped on front. Instead of a dark interior that shifts and seems somehow alive, we are given dusty brick walls and empty corridors. The castle feels lonely more than anything else. The gargoyles peering from the rafters bring echoes of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that I'd rather not acknowledge and, again, reduces Grayskull to a castle like any other. The designers give Grayskull no cohesive concept for its interiors. The entrance is a gothic stone corridor, the Sorceress's throne is an Egyptian pyramid, the labyrinth bears Roman coliseums, and the underground chamber is a haphazard mix between She-Ra's Crystal Castle and some vast region of outerspace (although the underground design certainly trumps all the rest of Grayskull). It's as if four different animators with completely different concepts for Grayskull decided they would each control a part of it. In the end, they succeed in making Grayskull into a confusing nothing. This is why the Sorceress's new Egyptian design does not fit in at all. If Grayskull were a pyramid, it would be appropriate, but not inside this castle. The Sorceress, the series's spiritual center, should be beautiful and simple, but the new design weighs her down with ornate designs and a heavy golden headdress. The new Castle Grayskull is this series' ultimate failure, unable to recapture almost any of the aura, suspense, or power of the original. Instead, it is an architectural mishmash.
The only attempt to capture the mystique of old comes when the Sorceress leads He-Man to the underground chamber. Her firefly light leads Adam through Grayskull's corridors, allowing for some of the best lighting and direction in the entire episode. As the Sorceress and Adam descend to the underground chamber, echoes of "Origin of the Sorceress" abound. Since that episode provides our only idea of what it is like to receive the powers of Grayskull, it becomes the benchmark by which this new scene must compare. And, unfortunately, it falls short. The underground chamber is the only Grayskull location that takes our breath away even for a second, as the crystalline expansiveness wows our eyes. The Sorceress sends a ray down into a black abyss, hinting that the abyss may be just as important in providing Grayskull's power as it was in the old series. An ornate chest rises out from the blackness, revealing Adam's sword. I do like that this entire sequence is free of dialogue, as if the Sorceress knew Adam's decision without asking him and he knew what to do without being told. But the scene lacks any pause, any breath, any learning. Adam picks up the sword with little or no hesitance, whips it above his head, and declares, "By the power of Grayskull!," without even the least bit of encouragement. Even Zoar had to have some coaching from Kodak Ungor before she could become the Sorceress again. In a few wild anime camera moves, Adam becomes He-Man in a shock of electric blue light. The transformation happens too rapidly without any of the reverence it deserves. This should have been a quiet, powerful moment as Adam accepts his destiny, but instead it barrels over Adam's "It's heavy" protest to reach the finished product, a sword-wielding muscle man named He-Man that almost seems foreign to the whole event.
He-Man himself appears oddly disconnected and undeveloped in his first outing. Having just been created, he lacks any real personality of his own. The writers have taken great pains to improve our hero from the one of old. He-Man's action sequences are a lot like his old ones (picking up a boulder, deflecting Skeletor's blasts, stopping a fall in mid-air by plunging his sword into the cliffside), but they are a lot harder for him to perform. Lifting a boulder appears to take all his strength, as he carefully cuts the rock with his sword, pulls it up from the ground, and takes his time rising from his knees to hold the boulder completely in the air. A huge problem in the original series was that He-Man appeared to do anything and everything almost effortlessly. When a hero is all-powerful, he becomes boring. The new series has taken great pains to show He-Man is strong, but his feats of strength are not necessarily easy. This allows room for He-Man to be weak, to fall, to make a mistake. Already the writers have cured one of the major ills of the old show. I particularly love it when He-Man catches Randor as they fall into the lava pits and Randor asks, "He-Man, you can fly?" in a stroke of comedic genius. He-Man, of course, can not fly, pointing out one of his weaknesses right from the start. He plunges his sword into the mountainside to stop, but fails, and he has to let go of Randor to make the second attempt work. This is far more dramatic than He-Man quickly and effortlessly saving the day. Unlike the original series, the action sequences of the new one will actually be interesting.
If there is any message the new series is trying to send us, it is this: THE ACTION SCENES WILL BE MUCH, MUCH BETTER. At least a third of "The Beginning" movie is spent on battles, pairing up different character so they can square off and demonstrate their weapons and abilities. Just like "Diamond Ray of Disappearance," Mattel is using this as a toy commercial to demonstrate all the "neat things" each character can do, enticing us to buy. But such commercialism can be excused because the animators go to great lengths to make these tiffs interesting and exciting. One of the major problems of the old series was the "one strike, you're out" formula, which dictated that any time a villain was struck, hit, or kicked, he was automatically defeated and completely out of commission. This is why battles on the old series happen so quickly and quietly: all it takes is one action for a hero to knock out the villain. The new series has much more faith in the resilience of its characters. When Man-E-Faces knocks Mer-Man down, he stands up again and whips out his sword (cleverly using his belt emblem to hide his sword). The villains are not defeated easily and the heroes are not perfect, making the action scenes far more intriguing. The heroes might actually lose against these ferocious enemies.
While I do not have space to talk about every character individually, I would like to write a few quick impressions about each one:
Man-At-Arms - a more quiet force than I first expected, he maintains his fatherly presence with a bit more strategic intelligence. His once useless battle mace can change shape and produce strategy plans, and he seems more like a middle-aged warrior than the aging engineer of old.
Man-E-Faces - one of the most useless characters of the original toyline, Mattel could have ditched him this time around. But instead, they are trying to finally integrate Man-E with the rest of the cast. He still has not found his place, but he is more active than I expected. The question still remains whether his shifting faces actually change his personality and his powers or if they do nothing to him at all.
Ram Man - does not really have much to do here, but maintains the clumsy, dumbfounded personality of old, and his beefier redesign fits his powers perfectly
Mekaneck - this new series works hard to give Mekaneck the purpose he never really attained in the original; the fact that his neck can bend and twist will aid that goal a lot.
Stratos - not much different from the Stratos of old, his main purpose is to be the Defender that can actually fly.
I was actually amazed at how much Mattel did NOT change from the original series. Most of the characters' redesigns are variations on the old ones, and they all possess the same powers and even the same weapons of the originals (and the cartoon has managed to integrate the weapons in ways that Filmation never bothered to).
Teela has a refreshing new anime look, given long ponytail hair and a ferocious, wide-eyed attitude. She does not seem nearly as reserved and harsh as the old Teela; in fact, she comes across as playful, youthful, and freed up. This allows her to have more of a bantering sibling relationship with Prince Adam than the almost parental relationship of old. The new show chooses familiar ground with which to introduce them--the traditional training sequence in the Royal Palace courtyard under the watchful view of Man-At-Arms. Returning to this place assures the audience that nothing has changed at all. Adam and Teela's spirited attacks on each other tell us right from the start that their attraction is more than just the kind of bond childhood friends share. Teela's backflips and snake staff action prove she will certainly have more than her fair share of great action scenes in the new series.
Orko remains surprisingly unchanged from the original series. His more wizardly outfit works well, but his high-pitched squealing and Freudian slips prove he will be comedic relief all over again. That will probably be okay, since the writers must know Orko was overused in the original show. The writers have done an excellent job of solving yet another mystery from the original series: how Orko found out Adam's secret (or why Adam would tell him it at all). Orko and Cringer follow Adam to Grayskull and witness his transformation, becoming the only two other than the Sorceress and Man-At-Arms to know the secret. I like that Cringer and Battle Cat are unable to speak in the new series. It allows Cringer to be frightened constantly without the whiny voice (he looks more like a real cat too). Battle Cat's new design is disappointing, however. The animators have scaled back his armor, but his head is way too small for his body. Orko, Cringer, and Battle Cat always bear the burden of being the funny sidekicks, and the jury is still out on exactly how they will function in this new series.
King Randor and Queen Marlena are remarkably muted in their twenty-first century redesigns. The gruffness of Randor's original voice is missing, and he almost sounds like he could be He-Man's age. The animators have chosen to dress Randor and Marlena in the same brown and orange colors, but this has a dulling effect. Whereas the original Queen Marlena, in her striking and simple green gown, provided a commanding presence even when she did not speak, the new Marlena seems quiet and unaware. She's a token mother figure without any of the intelligence and power of the original. I can hardly imagine this Queen Marlena being a headstrong astronaut from the planet Earth.
But while Mattel and Mike Young Productions have done a credible job with the heroes, their energies have obviously been better spent on the villains. Maintaining the looks and color schemes for the Evil Warriors, the animators have wisely sharpened the appearances and powers of Skeletor's ratpack. Here's my rundown:
Mer-Man - the Best Entrance award goes to Mer-Man, who pops out of a swampy pool in foreboding, grand style. The animators have taken away the bumbling oafishness of the original and made Mer-Man's fishy origins an asset. His razor-sharp teeth, piercing eyes, and throaty voice make him dangerous and full of malice. His scene with the giant floating blowfish goes on way too long, however, and having Man-At-Arms trapped in its belly is a little too "Jonah and the Whale" for my tastes.
Beast Man - the quintessential first henchman, Beast Man fails to return to his darker roots from the first episodes of the original series. Instead, the writers have opted to go with the bumbling, clueless Beast Man that became the norm. His chief allies appear to be the Griffins, which allow him to swoop in and rescue Skeletor whenever necessary. The scene where the two ride Griffins and the wind flies against them is one of the strongest sensory moments in the episode and proves that Beast Man is Skeletor's right hand man.
Trap Jaw - thankfully, Trap Jaw's foolishness has been reduced and his powers emphasized. His huge robotic arm supports almost any weapon, and he actually seems threatening now.
Clawful - the loneliest of Skeletor's first season band, Clawful was a villain who always had great potential with his echoing voice and devilish eyes. The new series kills that potential by giving him the idiot voice and brain that Trap Jaw abated. But, like all the other villains, his terrific redesign and blazing powers reveal a triumph of brawn over brain.
Whiplash - how did Whiplash get so big? He's huge now, and the better for it. His tail cracks down on Teela, and if that doesn't frighten a person, Whiplash sitting on you will.
Tri-Klops - the "odd man out" of Skeletor's original five cohorts (Beast Man, Trap Jaw, Evil-Lyn, Mer-Man, and Tri-Klops), Tri-Klops returns in this series with newfound purpose. His cyclops eye can shoot fire now (among other things, I'm sure), and his Doom Seeker robots attack when we least expect them to. The Doom Seeker have not been fully explained, but they add purpose to Tri-Klops. Expect a lot more from him in the future.
Of course the most improved villain is Evil-Lyn, who reaches her full potential in this new series. While the new design is a little too sticks-and-bones for me, the attitude and the power are all there. Whereas it was sometimes unclear her role in the original series, Evil-Lyn is undoubtedly second-in-command now. She stands alongside Keldor in his first scene, and takes over for Skeletor when he escapes with Randor. And just as Skeletor receives a tilting shot over his body upon entrance, so too does Evil-Lyn warrant a similar shot later on, proving that she is just as threatening. Her staff-length crystal ball is an improvement and her glowing purple eyes are a welcome addition to her sorceress ensemble. Whereas Evil-Lyn always seemed like Teela's evil counterpart in the original series, this Evil-Lyn positions herself far beyond Teela's level. As a longtime Evil-Lyn fan, it is a thrill to see her finally kicking butt. After Tri-Klops, Trap Jaw, and Beast Man each try to break the mystic wall, Evil-Lyn steps forward and declares, "Step aside, boys," and fires her magical best. While her attempt fails (allowing Skeletor to assume his rightful role as destroyer of the mystic wall), the sequence proves the hierarchy of the Evil Warriors and Evil-Lyn's place atop it. Perhaps no moment among the action scenes is more powerful than when Evil-Lyn sends a cosmic blast across the Evergreen Forest and turns it into a barren wasteland, turning the tables and making the Evil Warriors the team to beat. Never would the original He-Man series have produced a moment where it seemed so much like the villains would actually win. Skeletor's army is, on a hand to hand ratio, more powerful than He-Man's Defenders, allowing them to become the longtime threat legend has made them out to be. Now we understand why Eternia needs He-Man: these enemies are too strong for anyone but him.
Evil-Lyn's rise to power could not come without a hint of mutiny. Writer Dean Stefan chooses to end the episode with a tacked-on scene where Evil-Lyn questions Skeletor's authority. "Perhaps you think you could run things better than I," Skeletor coldly says to Evil-Lyn, eliciting the conciliatory reaction he wanted from her. The scene is rather useless in "The Beginning," but it does promise plenty of classic tension between these two power-starved villains. Evil-Lyn will be her own force in this new series.
But just like "Diamond Ray of Disappearance," the true star of this premiere episode is Skeletor. Retaining the wit of the original, this Skeletor is far more powerful and threatening than ever before. His voice leaves much to be designed, but Mattel has successfully re-imagined him as a warrior. The new Skeletor is far more physical, allowing him to fight He-Man almost equally. His flips and jumps into the air, his amazing sword slashing, and his dynamic mid-air moves all reveal the potent influence of anime on the new Masters of the Universe. Skeletor can do almost anything, and that makes him a stronger villain. Thankfully, the animators have brought back the Havoc Staff and added a royal cape, giving Skeletor a captive elegance and form he did not quite possess before. The director has overused the red eyes glowing, which are supposed to signal the moments when Skeletor gets most angry. The red eyes were used throughout original He-Man memorabilia, but Filmation chose to resist it. It was inevitable that the new cartoon would employ the red eyes, but the animators should be frugal with their usage. On the other hand, director Gary Hartle chooses brilliantly to obscure Skeletor's skullface until he finally reveals it to King Randor, the man he blames for his deformation. As Randor wisely responds, "You did it to yourself," cleverly pointing out that Skeletor's evil will poison himself and ultimately bring his downfall. Obscuring Skeletor's face, shrouding him in darkness, and granting him legendary fighting skills and magic powers have bolstered Skeletor to the level he was always meant to achieve--a serious, powerful supervillain almost incapable of defeat. Skeletor still delivers terrible dialogue about threatening He-Man and ruling Eternia, and he still surrounds himself with blundering idiots (he gets annoyed with Beast Man), but he's a much stronger villain than the one Alan Oppenheimer voiced (even if Oppenheimer's Skeletor laugh was much better). As always, Skeletor remains the star of He-Man's show.
Mattel and Mike Young Productions have done an amazing job of streamlining and retelling the often incongruous He-Man mythology. The Hall of Wisdom, which never appeared in the original series, finally establishes the Council of Elders as the center of wisdom and power in Eternia. When Keldor attacks the hall, the Elders vanish and declare Captain Randor king of Eternia (finally proving that Randor rules over all, not just part, of the planet, but vanquishing the King Miro mythology of the old series). The Elders' disappearance marks a powerful shift for all of Eternia. Randor, standing alone in the now empty hall, hears only the voice of the Sorceress in falcon form. She declares, "Peace will come only for a time. A hero shall emerge to protect Eternia." Director Gary Hartle takes care to obscure the Sorceress until Adam meets her, cleverly hiding her in shadowed shots of her wings. The Sorceress explains to Adam that the Elders joined their powers and gave their energy to the Sorceress to protect. While this would seem to answer the question "What is the secret of Grayskull?," it does not quite make sense. If the ultimate power of Grayskull is the the power and knowledge of the Elders, then what did Grayskull exist before they stored their power in it? Why was the Sorceress living there? When Skeletor grills King Randor for information, he asks, "Now that the Council of Elders is no more, who controls the power of Eternia now?" What is this power of Eternia? Does it allow one to control Eternia, or the entire universe? Is is simply the knowledge and power of the original Elders? And why did Grayskull exist before it became the storage place for that power? Since Skeletor is still looking for the Elders, he does not even realize that Grayskull exists, adding an interesting new twist to the mythology. Skeletor will not attack Grayskull until he learns that the Elders' power is stored with in it. I am hoping that Grayskull houses more than just the Elders' magic. The original Grayskull kept its secret mysterious, but always offered the power to control the universe. This new series does not quite say if Grayskull offers this kind of power anymore or if the "power" is just the concentrated wisdom of Eternia's oldest Elders.
Furthermore, is the Hall of Wisdom still standing? With all the energy put into creating the Hall of Wisdom at the beginning of this movie, we would expect its presence to continue. I wish the animators had put as much effort into Grayskull as they did the hall. The opening shots and music in "The Beginning" are unrivaled by the rest of the story. On the whole, the music is banal and disinterested, providing more coverage than truly adding excitement. Places where the music should have provided the most emotion (such as Adam receiving the Power Sword) is where it remains the most unmemorable. The direction is vastly improved, showing what twenty years can do to children's animation. The moving camera shots, low angles, and blazing action cuts show the new influence of anime and modern cinema on animation. Director Gary Hartle has done a supreme job of making the once stagnant He-Man characters practically jump off screen.
The new He-Man series brings almost hundreds of welcome improvements upon the original, including better action scenes, better continuity, and darker villains, but it fails miserably when it comes to voices. King Randor and Mekaneck and Man-At-Arms all sound like the same person. Skeletor's voice is hollow and posses none of the resonant vocals of Alan Oppenheimer. He-Man's voice sounds the way a boring muscle-man's should, lacking any of the maturity and moral depth of John Erwin's performance. Even Evil-Lyn, who has the best voice of all the new characters, sounds grainy and desperate when listened against the golden confidence of Linda Gary's witch. All the characters look fantastic, but when they open their mouths, I want to cry.
Still, my complaints are largely nitpicky. Mattel and Mike Young Productions have overcome the major hurdles by firming up the mythology, finally telling the origin story of He-Man, and re-envisioning the entire cast of characters without taking away the appearances, powers, and personalities that first made us love them. I am impressed by how much has not changed, and most of the changes are welcome improvements upon the original series. Executive producer Bill Schultz has succeeded in guiding this new series to its rightful place. On the whole, "The Beginning" is off to a great start.
The AGP interface is much faster than the memory interface on most recent intel based machines. I do computer vision where a bunch of scratch pad memory is required - the memory on the graphics card is fast and can interlace with acces to main memory. Rumour has it many games take advantage of this. In Linux you can do it with X stuff and in Windows you can use DirectX to do it.
mods on crack
Ramdisks.. Takes me back to the days of my Amiga. I always thought the ramdisk on that was a great boost.. Made a lot of things a hell of a lot easier.
Well, that's probably what makes it a cool hack ;-)
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
I don't know why I am so cynical tonight, but give me a break - yes its cute and clever to use your video ram for something other than video but if you have a video card with a lot of ram you probably also put a reasonable amount in your computer in the first place - nice stunt, but not very useful IMHO.
Not really. There have been hacks that allow you to setup a RAMdisk in video memory for years (since back in the days of 256KB video cards). This is old 5k001.
Would the speed of the VRAM be affected by the AGP read back bandwidth issue? I'm looking for the story that was posted on slashdot a while back, but the search function is less than adequate.
On another note, this would be usefull for older machines that only have SIMMS and use EDO/FP RAM which is a lot more expensive than todays SD/DDR RAM. But, alas, those old machine don't have AGP ports. So, really, I don't see the point to this.
Cthulhu Saves.
RAM right now varies from PC-133 (133Mhz) up do DDR400 (200Mhz DDR effectively 400Mhz)
where as VRAM on most cards with 128meg of VRAM range from 600Mhz-700Mhz. So would there be a bottleneck accessing this VRAM from the AGP bus as opposed to RAM from the FSB? (I believe the AGP runs at 66Mhz still?)
Check it out, it works http://www.
From first hand experience in the field, graphics hardware guys do not sweat reliability of the data inside their DRAMs. If you're storing important data there, be prepared for it to disappear, particularly if you are a l33t overclocker.
I guess, since you can't use your texture RAM in Linux anyway (unless you want to watch 3d screen savers), you might as well put all the RAM on that GeForce 4 to use somehow.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Wow, does this take me back! I remember the really good old-school DOS memory managers (QEMM, for example) were able to create a handful more conventional memory beyond the 640k limit by using video memory in textmode. Quite handy for things like Word Perfect 5.1.
<JOKE>
So I guess Linux is finally catching up to DOS.
</JOKE>
There was some work done toward getting Linux to map VRAM in as regular-old user or kernel memory. I don't have the link handy, but I believe I saw it on the linux-kernel list.
Occasionally I have delusions of trying something like this - treating the division between the VRAM and regular RAM as a case of non-uniform memory access, and using existing algorithms to prefer the faster memory.
Here's some instances...
/tmp on headless servers? (Its common to leave a video card in headless servers for maintanance).
I just happen to have a nVidia geForce2go which I'm using in vesa mode becasue the nvidia module is proprietary...
Now I can swap to the video memory I'm not using and put that memory to use.
How about using that video memory for
I just don't understand why people are so negative when people have come up with a new way to show just how flexible the linux kernel can be... just because some feature doesn't meet your needs doesn't mean it doesn't meet mine.
If you want a one size fit all solution, then try some of those companies in the northwest part of the country.
If you've used up all the slots you have available for RAM, this is one way to pack more RAM into your machine.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to we
This goes to show how virus authors's creativity evolves pretty fast, its funny how nowadays someone is showing how to use VRAM for legitimate purposes. Who would have known? Those crazy VXers thought of it first.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Don't you know how perty X is with 64MB of DDR on a GeForce3? Try running top and you'll see that X barely even shows up on the charts with that much ram on a video card. I rarely see more than 5% memory usage by X.
The guy who was working on the Doom port was trying to get extra memory from anywhere that he could so that he could load the WAD files entirely into memory.
He had this wonderful idea of allocating the frame buffer and then using the excess video memory to store extra data.
It failed miserably when he realised that you can't actually read from the Dreamcast's VRAM, only write.
have a motherboard with an embedded graphics controller and this lets me make use of the otherwise dead card (I don't want to buy another monitor)
"It's even worse if you're locked into a proprietary operating system." -http://www.wehavethewayout.com/scale.asp?rew=0
Ultimately it is irrelevant whether a practical application exists for this specific hack. It represents a gain in knowledge and a better familiarity with the machines we employ.
Say you want the hide "data", outside of normal memory. This a great way to add secure memory.
Write a fast bitblit routine to erase the "hidden memory. Use the graphic engine to add real time xor of crypto keys.
Don't think of it as just memory but think of it as secret memory.
Shaun
now i can use the 2megs that X _DIDN'T_ gobble up!
Most of the drivers and TSRs that I wanted to load in the space originally allocated for monochrome video (a 32K block between B0000 and B7FFF) required more space to load than to run so I came up with the solution of 'borrowing' some VRAM and wrote the Video Hole package to do just that. I used a BIOS call to change the display page from 0 to 6 (for reasons I never quite understood, 7 didn't work on my old Trident 8900) and 'borrowed' 24000 bytes (6 pages of VRAM) from the VRAM to allow a program (say MSCDEX?) to fit in there, then 'recalled' the loan, changing back to page 0. That extra 24K more than took care of the transient portion of a lot of programs that otherwise couldn't use the Video Hole.
I don't know if anyone else ever used the darned thing (nobody ever sent me the $5 shareware fee for doing so) but it got uploaded to a bunch of BBSes and works in the real mode phase of Win95 and 98 - if you have hardware with real mode drivers that don't know how to load low and relocate the resident portion high, it will do the job fine.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Although I don't have a lot of VRAM to spare, this gave me an idea I might play with...
I have an old 486DX4 system, with one of those cool AMD 486 processors with double L1 cache and Write-Back (WB) cache mode. (Trust me, these 486's are much faster than the rest of the pack). There's only one problem though: the motherboard has very few L2 cache (256k), which makes it unable to cache more than 32MB of RAM in WB mode. So, to put in more memory, I would either have to switch to Write-Through (WT), which would be slow, or have a mix of cacheable and non-cacheable memory, which is even slower.
What does all this have to do with the mentioned article, you might wonder? Well, it immediately gave me the idea that I might be able to add more RAM to that PC, use the lowest (cacheable) part for the system, and use the above as a Memory Technology Device (MTD), perhaps putting some swap space on it. Weird, huh? Still, if it works, it'll probably be somewhat better than leaving the extra memory in a drawer gathering dust...
Too bad I'll be travelling in a few days, so my spare time right now is next to zero. *sigh* But I'll have to try it sometime.
Vasilis Vasaitis
Late readers: please moderate at Newest First, with a low threshold, to promote late writers.
I just don't understand why people are so negative...
Sort of like when the guy cut and pasted an advertisement as a Slashdot article, it's the spirit of the submission that leads to the likely response. In this case the submission basically argues that one should use a "cheap 128MB video card" as RAM, yet in my neck of the woods I can buy over a GB of DDR333 RAM for less than I can buy a 128MB videocard. It just was a really nonsensical way of wording that.
I used a similar technique on my XT compatible after I upgraded it with a VGA card with 256KB of RAM on it (long after everyone had thrown away their XTs). So long as you managed to avoid writing into the visible screen, a lot of it could be used for storage (with a bit of work on the page selection registers). I still have that machine. It's got 640k on the main board, 256k on the VGA, and 2 MB on an EMS 4.0 board. (2.875 MB total) There were times when I used every byte.
Of course there's a big difference between boosting a maxed out XT and expanding the capacity of your P4 2.8Ghz from 2GB to 2.064GB.
Support SETI@home
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Haha. What a loser.
I remember some guy saying:
"640KB ought to be enough for everybody"
Think about the fact that a old of older pentium 1/socket7/super7 motherboard chipsets can't handle caching about 64 meg of ram. As a result if you add more ram the system may slow down because the L2 cache can't address about 64. Also, simms tend to be expensive. Now if you take a old pentium for a router or fileserver and you have a few old 4 meg or so video cards that X might not support anyways you can configure them as swap devices which a) you don't have to worry about slowing down the system due to L2 caching addressing limits b) swapping to ram devices is a hell of a lot faster than swap. This hack allows you to add some more life to a few older systems at the cost of a few pci slots.
I know this hack isn't great for newer systems but I have plenty of older boxes that can take advantage of this nicely.
auto262814@hushmail.com
The guy probably spent *days* figuring this thing out, and, for what? Who will use this? What value does it provide? It's a cool hack, sure, but it serves no point. If you're going to hack something, at least make the end result worthwhile.
Some people love hacking their cars, but they don't use their gas tank to hold their washer fluid simply because it's possible to do so.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I'd like to point out how well this speaks of the Linux kernel. By making the architecture generic and orthagonal, it allows you to do cool (if useless) stuff like this. Contrast this to Windows, where every API is extremely specifc, and you'll realize why Linux/UNIX is infinately better.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Finally! I can put my stacks and stacks of C64s to good use! I'll just make them into a "huge" MTD!
Some assembly required.
[Error 407: No signature found]
Lingam gnosis is based on the belief that all penises fall into one of four broad essential categories, or types fire, air, earth and water. Most commonly, however, penises are a combination of two or more of these types.
The Earth Penis
Earth penises are relatively easy to identify as they resemble tuberous vegetables yams, potatoes, turnips etc. Those thick, starchy roots that grow best when buried deep in dark, damp soil. Earth penises are generally large, often irregularly shaped, and darkly pigmented. The testicles that accompany the earth penis are likely to be large, hairy and pendulous. The earth penis is homely and supremely functional, it likes to plant and plow, and itís likely to belong to the top in any relationship. Earth penises typically correspond with meat and potatoes sexual tastes. If your man has an earth penis don't expect anything too outragous. He might like it rough, but he'll always keep it simple-like himself. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, if he's carrying one of these brutes in his Calvins, chances are he aint too bright.
The Air Penis
Air penises are generally long, slim and pale, with neat, globular, lightly pigmented testicles, carried high and tight. The most aesthetically pleasing of the types, the air penis is an artistic penis, and their owners are often artistic. It is common for an air penis to have a bend or a dip in its length, and just as this penis is often not quite straight, the owner of an air type penis is the most likely of all the types to have bisexual tendencies. If your lover has an air penis, commitment could be an issue air penises are notoriously unfaithful and fickle. However, once captured, air penis types make the most intelligent and imaginative sexual partners.
The Fire Penis
Fire is the most masculine of the elements, and a fire penis always correlates with an aggressive, assertive, controlling nature. A typical fire penis is thick, straight, symmetrical and smooth, though not especially long. The defining characteristic of the fire penis, however, is its color bright red, through to an intense hot pink. Men with a fire penis in their pants have a burning sexuality and charisma to burn, too. There are always plenty of moths dying to dance around this flame! But before you singe your wings, remember: sex with the owner of a fire penis can be hot as hell, but life with one is usually just plain hell, so if your intended unzips one of these crimson lollipops, zip it up quick and move on.
The Water Penis
Water is the most feminine of the elements, and, accordingly, water type penises are often small, soft and feminine in appearance. Owners of water penises are generally nurturers in their relationships; they will cook, clean, iron and give it up with an almost touching if it wasnít so fucking irritating sense of duty. Occasionally, this taking on of the motherly role can lead them to assume the balance of power within a relationship for the other partner this is both claustrophobic and scary, particularly when they find themselves fucking them and enjoying it! Water penis owners are often very highly sexed organisms, especially when alcohol is added. For a water penis, a couple of G&Ts is a never-fail legs-opener.
This +1 Informative post has been brought to you by SweetAndSourJesus
Yeah, useless shite like this is really cool. Plus you CAN do the same thing in Windows, if you know the API's and have a clue. Stupid kid. Learn DirectX. Learn how to spell. Then get a life.
How the f*ck can a penis look feminine?! :-)
Although Alan Kay et. al. designed the Xerox Alto to use 80% of its resources for the Graphical User Interface (the real innovation -- understanding that the purpose of the computer is its user interface), SmallTalk needed extra memory and used the bottom part of the screen video memory for its stack. As a result, you could see when something crashed or went into infinite recursion.
Have you ever stimulated your anus? It can feel quite good, even to heterosexuals.
I used this trick long long times back. I was a unix programmer but was using DOS based gateway so that I can use the novell servers in NYNEX ( you may remember who NYNEX was ). I was running short of memory by about 10 - 20K bytes and finally used this video ram for keeping my data structure. There were about 11 TSRs you needed to load to get IP and IPX stack going on DOS.
If your voice mail boxes work even today ( unless they threw away the code
Anyway, these are not the brightest momenst of my programming life but sure was interesting.
Just kidding. No one would be nasty and put viral code where no scanner has gone before.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
The AGP deal is a driver problem, not an issue with AGP or PCI itself.
...at 0xA000:0 on IBM-compatibles, like some stealth-viruses going from MBR->main mem did, IIRC.
Oh great, must wait two minutes. How queer.
Basically Apple is finding a use for all of that VRAM while users are futzing around not playing 3D games. Granted, it's finding interesting ways to accelerate 2D video and using the AGP to pull from main RAM as well, but it's in the same sprit as stuffing random data in there.
Rather than buy an extra card for this purpose, the question to ask is how much of that 128MB am I using day-to-day. If the answer is *none* (as Apple determined) then this is a good thing.
subst. if you *REALLY* want memory as a drive. UGH.
wow! 128 megs of ram! for the low low price of only $400!!!! yeah, maybe in 1994!
I've been reading slashdot for a year or two now and I can tell that no human touches submissions before they are posted. The frequently maligned 'slashdot editor' that does not do any spell/grammar checking is probably vi or emacs, not any human. I think it is likely a legal dodge that submissions are not remangled before braodcasting, leaving the liability of such information at the feet of the original submittor.
..thank you for not moderating it above 2. It's not interesting. It's not insightful. It's barely funny and - oh my gawd - it isn't a troll.
A score of two is just about right. How about that poster-sets-max-score option, developers?
Mod the parent up. The original poster was a fucking tool.
I've often wondered why operating systems today require so much RAM in the first place. Most people just want to browse the web, check their email, and perhaps play some music. Why does Windows, or any other OS, require such resources to pull off these relatively simple tasks?
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Is there any way to recruit the GPU as a second CPU to speed up my kernel compiles? Now THAT would be a truly cool hack!
Spammenot.
i think this technique is for the geel of it, not really for the practicality.
Never heard this one before. If it's a typo you may have just coined new jargon.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
who will have spare VRAM after installing Doom 3?
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Half the hacks posted on Slashdot tend to be next to useless anyways.
And the other half are kind of like modern art. You know, the sort of thing where -- if you understand it -- the only reasonable response is: "What the fuck? That's pretty cool."
In mathematics, one does not understand things, one merely gets used to them.
--VonNeumann
Hey, come on, give the guy a break! He is Polish, after all.
/me dodges thrown fruit. (I'm Polish too, so don't get your panties all in a knot).
I have a CF card reader that works as a small drive I could certainly put the Swap file on it.
upto a 512 mb, it's slower than ram, but faster than a hard drive..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
My old amiga could do this. My A1200 had 2 megs of vram and when its 8 megs of fast ram was used up the system would often start moving into that memory. Thing is it slowed down the computer considerably.
Even my A3000 can do this with Cybervision (RTG software) once fast ram was used up it could use the memory on the video card as zorro expansion memory (ie memory attached to the system expansion bus).
Neat thing was it did this all dynamically and automatically - without you having to specify space or anything.
I can tell that no human touches submissions before they are posted
... I've had story titles changed between submission and posting, fortunately I haven't had errors introduced on my behalf <touch wood>
Have you ever submitted a story and had it accepted? The editors do touch them. There are numerous examples of the submitter posting a comment apologising for the errors that have been introduced.
And this isn't just hearsay
...at least supposedly.
Unfortunately editing is not one of
Slashdot's strengths.
The filesystem is the package manager
Not all AGP cards / systems have symetrical transfer rates. Some AGP combinations are quite slow reading from the card. An order of magnitude slower in some cases.
Economics as well since the cost per byte for the VRAM is considerable compared to the cost of increasing the system memory.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I don't know about anyone else in here, but I actually plan on trying to implement this. We all seem to be overlooking one great big niche here: servers. I run an AMD K6-II as my server, it has a single stick of 128 MB RAM. It also has an old 4 MB video card in an AGP 2x slot, that means I can add 4 MB of 132 MHz RAM, totalling my physical RAM out to 132 MB. No, that isn't very much, but hey, do I run X on my server?
No.
Do I have a video card sitting in my AGP slot?
Yes.
Is there a legitimate reason -not- to use that card for something at least?
NO!!!
Sure, my desktop has 512 MB RAM, and 64 MB VRAM, I don't need to dip into that extra RAM, but for my server, that's 4 more MB that I have available now before I have to access a terribly slow swap file. Besides, isn't this the main use of *NIX anyway, webserving? All modern PCs have AGP slots now, if you run your own server, and it has a PII or newer, chances are good it has AGP support, at -least- 1x. Chances are also good you have a video card lying around. So why not do something cool with it, rather than collect dust?
Just a thought guys.
They never ask themselves "Why?" before writing these nonsense articles.
now if only i could find "one of these cheap 128MB graphics cards" so I could "enjoy the speed"
Well, someone got bored one day and coded a ramdisk driver for MSDOS and GUS so that you could use the extra ram (games were only using the lowest 256 KB's) as an ramdisk.
I remember downloading that driver from an BBS back in the day; it worked ok, but since I rarely used more than a meg or two out of my 4 megs anyway it wasn't of any use.....
Stupidist news item, ever.
this may be useful for those old video cards that you never use anymore. I've got a 16MB Voodoo Banshee I don't use anymore.. I wonder if it would be possible to install it for an extra 16MB of RAM? I wouldn't be wasting a good video card then, and I have another one that I use as my primary.
I did this with my vga on my 8086 just to have a few more kb. Didn't want to do this anymore with current machines, but the use for thin clients is pretty handy. Probably will try it out.
Well, I have one AGP slot, I'm running win2k for software compatability reasons, I don't even have 64meg of ram on my card, let alone 128meg and I run graphic intensive applications.
Guess that rules me out.
One the other hand, my Linux server has a whopping 2meg of ram on it's video card - yes - I'll add that to the 512meg already there to make an amazing difference in performance !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I wonder if the author ever benchmarked this. Reading back from AGP-cards is usually horribly slow. Much much MUCH slower than writing. The article that was posted on slashdot a couple of weeks ago shows why it is a bad idea to treat the VRAM as general purpose ram.
a way to use the unused processor power of that gfx card to run an extra seti@home ;-)
This is actually a fairly common practice in Gamecube programming, only using audio ram. The GC has a measly 24 Megs of main ram and a whopping 16 Megs of audio ram. The transfer is reasonably fast, and it certainly makes it easier to port a PS2 engine which from the PS which has 32 Megs. There was an article in Game Developer not too long ago about automating this as virtual ram using the PowerPC's memory-mapping capabilities rather than the manual approach usually taken.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Don't you think it's "geek feel" of it, instead of geek appeal? Anyway, it's either a very clever typo or a new entry in the new hackers dictionary.
If you already have the card installed anyway then the cost per byte is zero.
If you have a spare video card that you're not using, then the cost per byte is zero.
If you have a choice between a card with more RAM and a card with less RAM, then the cost per byte may be small (positive), zero, or even negative, depending on the marketing strategies of the respective card manufacturers.
GeForce4 MX 420 PCI.
OR
Radeon 7000 PCI.
Both 64MB cards. And both with RAM that's considerably faster than EDO/FP (or even PC100 SDR SDRAM)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How much of your system RAM is running at 5-600Mhz and dual-ported?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You know, Amigas did this from day 1. And they did it better.
In an Amiga system, you had unified memory, some of which ("chip ram") was accessible to the custom chips, which primarily included the video and audio subsystems.
The standard memory allocation function call allowed you to specify which type of memory you needed to allocate -- ANY, CHIP, or FAST (fast being faster than chip ram because there were no bus contention problems, as I understand it).
Anyway, the Amiga also had a ramdisk device (accessible on your desktop as "Ram Disk", and mapped to the "RAM:" drive). This was the standard place that had the subdirectories t and clips, the temporary storage space and clipboard were mapped to, respectively.
Anyway, it was common, when programming an Amiga, to notice the hooks for warm and cold resets when reading docs. I recall many sideways glances at the system.
So I guess it was a small step to make the Recoverable Ramdisk Device (RRD:). I can't remember what I used it for specifically now, but I certainly used it, and I liked it a lot.
As a final note, since someone mentioned using the video subsystem's blitter for normal tasks... this was VERY common on the Amiga, too. The blitter was a very powerful, well-known, and well-respected feature of the machines, and so was not taken lightly. I think the standard memory copy function calls used this feature whenever possible. It was certainly used for disk-related transfers (although I'm not sure exactly how), and for any other time when it would be more beneficial.
All of this was done with a little innovation, and without the benefit of things like MMUs.
In short, Linux could learn a lot from this. And I hope it does.
just how close are current gfx boards to DSPs? I mean, I don't really know what's so special about DSPs, but I assume they're basically MIMD floating point workhorses, or something?
We've all heard of using the blitters for shifts, xors, etc. And modern chips have all these new 3d-capabilities, including some really cool programmable textures and things.
Does anyone know just how powerful all of this could be if used optimally in a system? I suspect that Apple's new approach with quartz is just scratching the surface.
I have got a Pentium 200 MMX with 128 Mb of ECC EDO, no free memory slots. It sounds quite fair to buy a 64 Mb PCI graphics card for less than $100, if I could use like 60 Mb for fast swap.
BUT: What if I put 60 MB swap on this fast VRAM-swap, and another 256 MB swap on an old, rotten and slow IDE drive? Will Linux detect that the first swap is faster and make extensive use of it, or will the slow 256 MB swap ruin my performance anyways?
Do you remember RAD: the recoverable RAM disk? You could *BOOT* from it, that was the coolest thing ever.
:-)
Also, RAM: could be a *dynamic* ram disk that got bigger and smaller on demand. Very cool.
We need a bootable/dynamic/recoverable RAM disk in the Linux kernel NOW!
Now if I can just get it to use the idle processor usage on my video card for distributed.net......
I never said that you couldn't do the same thing in Windows. I said that it speaks well of the UNIX APIs that such obscure functionality can be access through entirely generic APIs. The fact that you can just go ahead and use standard mmap functions to map random bits of memory is genuinely cool to those (like me) who value some elegence and beauty in software architecture. And thanks for the great example, by the way. DirectX is exactly what I'm talking about. Specific APIs to access generic functionality. Why should I have to use a different API to map graphics memory vs mapping regular memory vs mapping a file? Its just not clean! But it characterizes the Windows way of doing things.
PS> As for the comments about my intelligence and my spelling:
1) I've known DirectX since I was in the tenth grade. Learned Win32 just after I learned the C++ standard library.
2) I just got off summer break, it was late at night, and I was typing that on a laptop keyboard, so fuck off!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Yes, you can use the memory from your video card as a fast storage medium. Some of you are saying that you can store files to swap around and stuff like that, video card memory is just like system memory, it goes away when turning off. Sure you can use the firmware storage but there is generally little left after you store the firmware.
Then, NO, it won't increase your system memory. If you have 128 MB RAM you still will have only 128 MB of RAM. You just will have a temporary disk where you can then create a swap partition. Kinda like adding memory if you swap a lot but technically, you will still only have 128MB RAM.
Finally if you have a 128 MB video card you will probably only get 127 MB of space from it since the card still needs memory for important things like video.
Some PC manufactures did this recently.. and called it "shared memory". I have a Monorail PC
(it was a hardware division of Corel IIRC) that
allocates (at a minimum, even with an offboard video card) 2M of the system memory for video.
It sounds like a good idea, but if you happen to run something like windows and a bad application
peeks where it oughtn't things get very nasty.
(Rainbow Screen of Death)
Were that I say, pancakes?
it's so much faster though...
also...the coolness factor is way up there.
I wonder if I could get this to work with memory from a Soundblaster AWE 32? I have an old 486 that I use, and the sound card can slot up to 32MB, which is as much memory as the system itself has. If I could use that as swap space, it should be much faster than swap space on the harddrives.