Spectre GCR Manual Manuals - Atari Documentation Archive

Spectre Menus
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\tV
This mode forces color off, and forces there to be no floppy disk
cache. The floppy cache speeds things up radically. If you're running
off floppies on a 1 meg machine, such as the 1040, you would do better
to use the 512K mode and a 320K cache (see next menu item), than to
run in the highest memory mode, except if you absolutely must have
that memory - such as for HyperCard. If you don't care about floppy
speed, (e.g., you're running a hard disk), then feel free to tum the
cache off, and get another 320K of available memory.
You can't use 832K with a color monitor, so you'll be set to 512K
automatically.
Laser Printer
If you select the Atari SLM804 Laser Printer "on", you will lose 1
meg of memory to the Laser Printer buffer (the Laser, by its design,
requires 954,000 bytes of system memory to be reserved to build up a
memory image of what the page will look like; the memory image is
then dumped into the Laser Printer at very high speed.)
If you're on a 2 meg machine, and tum the Laser Printer on, you'll
be left at 408K memory for Mac mode if you leave the cache on. That's
very shaky for many Mac programs. It might be best to disable the
cache, and recover the 320K of memory it takes up. A 2.5 meg machine
will be okay, as will a 4 meg machine.
Because different people usc the Mac for different things, we've
left all these options configurable. For instance, if the Mac tells you it
needs more memory, tum off the cache on the Spectre menu page and
try again.
Cache Menu
The Cache is a dedicated RAMDISK. It works like this: Whenever
you read or write a disk sector, it is remembered in memory, in the
Cache. The next time you need that disk sector, it's read from memory
instead of from disk, at much, much higher speed (see Figure 7).
As a demonstration, turn the cache on, and run MacPaint from
floppy. It'll take 17 seconds to load; that's normal floppy load time. All
those sectors you just read were stored in the Cache. Now, quit from
MacPaint, and rerun it; this time, it will load in 3 seconds, straight out
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