Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!cornell!rochester!ur-tut!ur-valhalla!micropen!dave From: dave@micropen (David F. Carlson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Anyone have or seen a copy of FlickerFree software? Summary: big win Keywords: flickerfree Gibson Research software PC Message-ID: <521@micropen> Date: 14 Jul 88 13:28:45 GMT References: <638@drexel.UUCP> Organization: Micropen Dirent Writing Systems, Pittsford, NY Lines: 22 In article <638@drexel.UUCP>, jeff@drexel.UUCP (Jeff White) writes: > > Has anyone in netland every worked with a piece of software called > FlickerFree? I've seen in advertised a couple of times InfoWorld. It's > published by Gibson Reserach (ala Steve Gibson), and advertises itself as > a 7k byte assembly language driver that completely replaces the BIOS screen > display calls to make screen updates much quicker. It looked to be a decent > Jeff White > Drexel University - ECE Dept. > rutgers!bpa!drexel!jeff Because the bios screen routines are in ROM, they require mucho wait-states to access (250nS rom vs. 150nS ram). By simply relocating the bios into ram, as many 386 boxes do, a factor of ~2-3 is made. So this was never the miracle that Steve Gibson might have liked to have sold. ("Up to 7 times faster" translates in non-marketing lingo to actually only ~2-3 times faster anyway.) -- David F. Carlson, Micropen, Inc. ...!{ames|harvard|rutgers|topaz|...}!rochester!ur-valhalla!micropen!dave "The faster I go, the behinder I get." --Lewis Carroll