In message <3A49B270.7DE1@ezy.net.au>, Roman Black <fastvid@EZY.NET.AU>
writes
>Firstly, I have only played with Delphi for a short while,
>as I don't like Pascal that much. It does seem to me that
>Delphi is very much a "idiot language". This almost always
>means; easy to make pretty screens but performs like shite.

Delphi is basically Turbo Pascal For Windows - with a pretty interface,
rather like a grown-up Visual Basic. It's pretty fast, although not
usually quite as fast as C - but it compiles much faster!.

>I get data from the par port using Turbo C (dos) and I
>program in C-- with smidges of 8086 asm thrown in. You
>can get a byte from the par port with something like a
>thebyte=inportb(port_id)
>which compiles down to a one-word cpu instruction and
>on a 486 or pentium is virtually instantaneous.
>
>Now I'm imagining (guessing) that Delphi has to beg
>Bill for a chance to peek at the par port, and like most
>windows programs will run very low performance.

Any version of Delphi later than 1.0 (that is, any 32 bit version)
doesn't allow you to access the hardware directly (version 1.0 had the
Port() procedure) - so in order to do so you have to write a small piece
of in-line assembler code - this is freely available on the net, and
consists of a handful of op-codes. This then reads the port directly,
and doesn't wait for Windows to give permission - which is why it's not
included in 32 bit Delphi.

>I don't really have a solution for you, other than to
>start programming for a high performance environment
>(I am still making dos apps that run fabulously under
>Win 95) OR, try finding a windows programming expert
>who knows how to beg/force etc windows to give you
>better access to the port.

As he's already almost certainly accessing the port directly it seems
more likely it's a problem with his code - rather than a Windows
problem?.

>Having done many years of fast hardware/software
>interfacing with dos apps to the real world it never
>ceases to amaze me just how PATHETIC windows is at
>controlling anything more than a word processor.

It's not that fast as a word processor :-).
--

Nigel.

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