Answer by Dmitry Grigoryev for Why did the TRS-80 CPU have priority over the...
A videoadapter can be fed with invalid data (resulting in flicker) if the memory is used by someone else. Obviously, you can't do that with the CPU: you have to stall it until the memory becomes...
View ArticleAnswer by Raffzahn for Why did the TRS-80 CPU have priority over the display?
Why did they instead give the CPU priority?It's the lowest effort solution. It needs no additional hardware (*1). At the same time it's a transaction safe solution. Whatever the CPU writes gets written...
View ArticleAnswer by Martin Rosenau for Why did the TRS-80 CPU have priority over the...
First of all: The TRS-80 was not the only computer with this problem, but there were many computers with this problem.The effect you describe is sometimes called "CGA snow" because before the...
View ArticleAnswer by supercat for Why did the TRS-80 CPU have priority over the display?
Most of the times when a lot of stuff was being written to the screen, people would want to wait for the display to be done updating before trying to read it. Letting the update get done faster was...
View ArticleWhy did the TRS-80 CPU have priority over the display?
The original TRS-80 had a separate bank of static RAM for video memory, so that there would be no interference between display and CPU when the CPU was just doing calculations in main memory.When it...
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