S1CA, I was going to put up that exact scenario of the external timer.

Kinda scary

merlin9x9 wrote:

quote:
Don''t forget that multitasking != multithreading

Yep. Although under Windows and some other OSes they''re actually extremely closely tied together - a process (aka ''task'') is just a logical collection of threads with its own address space (and optionally CPU) - the scheduler just thinks of itself as switching threads without making any real distinction between tasks (the virtual->real address space mapping simply being a part of the context with a bit of CPU support to make it work). Or at least that''s the impression I get of Windows from reading books like "Programming Applications For Windows" (used to be known as "Advanced Windows").


Cybertron wrote:

quote:
To multitask you need an operating system

Not necessarily - to use OS based multitasking or multithreading you do. But many programmers are essentially doing the same thing anyway when writing chains of callbacks called from a VSYNC interrupt for example. Same (as you mentioned) writing vector unit programs or IOP modules on the PS2 - I''d call that multitasking (more precisely, multiprocessing).


--
Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com

The Xbox supports one, and only one process, which itself can have multiple threads.

Here''s a link to an older Xbox XDK document, but I believe the info is still accurate.

http://www.xboxweb.com/features/xdkspecs.html

Here''s a quote:

quote:
"There will be no support for code running in user mode (Ring 3) on the Xbox game system. All code will execute in kernel mode (Ring 0). Only one process runs at a time, and that process will support multiple threads."

SS