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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!uhnix1!sugar!karl
From: karl@sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: How do I read the Joysticks?
Message-ID: <1207@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Dec-87 22:22:28 EST
Article-I.D.: sugar.1207
Posted: Tue Dec  1 22:22:28 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Dec-87 06:37:27 EST
References: <2058@crash.cts.com>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 18
Summary: 5% of code is responsible for 95% of the execution time; Do metrics show that hacking joysticks is worth it?

In article <2058@crash.cts.com>, haitex@pnet01.cts.com (Wade Bickel) writes:
>      When you say "more than sufficient speed", I can see you must not be
>    doing much real-time work.  I've seen John's "Lybians in Space" program,
>    and I know that he does.  For my work, if I were able to read the port
>    20 instructions faster by not using the device driver I would probably
>    do so.  The speed savings are probably greater than that, but since the
>    device drivers don't work for my application, it's academic.

It is widely agreed, from much study of code, that 5% of one's code is
responsible for 95% of the execution time.  It would be a bummer to discover
that your hacked out, badly behaved joystick code made no significant
improvement in the performance of your game because all the major time was
being burned in some other part of your program.  Further, you presumably
could have used the time spent writing the fast joystick code more
effectively by instead identifying and speeding up that critical 5%,
leaving you with a faster game that doesn't break with new releases of
the operating system.
--+'