What tornado will *not* do for your machine
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While tornado is brilliant and all that, there are just some things it won't
and cannot do. These are some of them:


Tornado will not speed up your machine. Anything but. In fact, a RO2 Arm2
machine with tornado running is just about usuable in a hires mode (but
remember a RO3 Arm2 in SVGA is so slow it's almost useless). Tornado's
advanced features do not come without a price, and both memory and speed
suffer under tornado. While tornado works fine on a RO2 Arm2 Mode 12 machine,
it's pretty much useless when you're using mode 21.
   Also, if you're planning to do any demanding computer use with tornado,
don't bother with less than 4Mb of RAM and a HD with 100Mb free. It'll work
quite nicely on 1Mb, but don't expect to have more than two or three
applications active. Also, your hard disc will sorta go spastic if you're not
careful as 1Mb fills up very quickly indeed, and then the VM kicks in. 2Mb
should be fine for typical use, but I'll put it this way - I wouldn't want to
write tornado apps on a 2Mb machine.
   Simplistically, tornado will not make a RO3 machine go as fast as a RO2
one. Simply can't be done I'm afraid. RO2 had some parts hardwired - which is
why it goes so fast.

Tornado will not make Basic multithread. Quite simply, the structure of the
existing BBC Basic won't allow different parts of the executable to be
running at once - or at least not without a lot of memory waste. With care, C
and assembler can multithread quite nicely, but you do have to be careful
when writing them.
   However, subtasks can still be written and called from in Basic. These
allow a cumbersome but effective method of multithreading processes.

Tornado does not provide full virtual memory. It only provides virtual memory
on memory blocks held in its system heap - and this allows files of almost
unlimited length to be loaded in and edited. It will not allow private areas
of memory to have virtual memory performed on them, nor will it allow code to
run in virtual space. The structure of the RISC-OS kernel prevents virtual
memory working correctly when applied to code images.
   Also, may I add that even if it were possible, I wouldn't allow it. I have
many objections to full VM, and personally only see it as a good method of
editing files larger than memory. No more.


No doubt, this list will grow. Keep watching this space ...
