To make a long story short, the gain in responsiveness will be disappointingly small if at all observable. And it will come at considerable complication to drivers, because under PE the cursor can be more than a 2-bit deep bitmap with the given hardware limitations. The OS updates the cursor under v...

Also, the 68K vector area and etc. are so small, it might be unnecessary to remap the DPRAMs, IF they do not conflict with a ROM image. I haven't tackled that part of the design yet. you can use the FC0-FC2 to signal a fetch of restart vector - as it's different to other vector fetches - and could ...

...needs some refinement to the hardware it it's going to run useful code. Some of it can be implemented using extra features present on DPRAM chips, depending on the actual chip. Also, some form of interrupt is needed if any kind of kernel is to run, to provide a periodic tick. Similar to QDOS, at ...

May I interject with some thoughts before this gets a bit out of hand? Having some decade+ experience with various modes of multiprocessing (you would not believe how some apparently mundane applications can get heavily multi-processed once security and redundancy come into play), and even a diploma...

I don’t think there will be very much interest in this subject unless some software is developed that makes good use of the concept - a killer app so to speak. But anyway... The documentation clearly shows that the Acorn Tube is designed around using the BBC operating system, and this extends down ...

Getting back to the real question, do you want a low cost, but very high performance second processor? If the answer is yes, it makes sense to make the interface compatible with the Acorn Tube. By the same token it's an even better idea to implement a socket for a modern Intel PC processor... The d...

If there was ever a Pandora's box of a topic, here it is.
That being said, it's REALLY important to know what symmetric processing is, and how many different kinds there are, to give the topic a proper treatment.

Hi, The multiplexing scheme simply makes a logical 'OR' function between the incoming data on the two ports, and relies on just one transmitting That explains that nicely. Reading QL wiring schematics now makes sense. RXD(SER2), TXD(SER1), are fed through two NOR-NAND gates, to drive INT of IPC, th...

My mouse connects to SER1, while Linux host to SER2. What has troubled me so far, is that incoming mouse data on SER1 appears also in SER2 input queue. I have not been able to figure out why. That I can easily answer. The two receive lines are internally connected, the hardware cannot distinguish b...

a serial mouse needs power just like anything else, but there is no direct way to get power from the serial port. So, the mouse uses a trick - most of the time, any output line on the serial port is at a high voltage level (~10V usually), and since the serial mouse normally just sends data, it has n...