The demo version of Calamus SL99 on my computer (P233/96 MB RAM) seems to be very slow. Is this a restriction of the demo version?
Calamus SL2000 is the successor of the original Calamus, which, as you know, is developed on Atari computers. The embedded or external TOS emulators today offer the possibility to run the same Calamus on the three platforms Windows (95/98/NT/2000), Mac OS (via (!MM)) and naturally now as before on current Atari computers and TOS-copmpatible clones. The advantages lie in the identical document formats, so that you can work in parallel on Macs and PCs and always only need ONE document. Equally the development and maintenance of this powerful program and its modules is naturally appreciably smaller and platform-dependent errors are minimized.
The emulator that allows Calamus SL2000 to run on PCs has to
translate each individual program step from Motorola-format to the
Intel-format and back again, as the PC processors use the Intel
command language. Unfortunately this results automatically in a
physical
reduction of the running speed. So a 233 MHz PC is not
exactly the fastest PC machine for Calamus SL.
On Apple computers matters are completely different, as the operating system (!MM) can offer virtually the full computer speed for Calamus. Hence comparisons between Macs and PCs with the same clock speed show a speed increase of 10-20 (!) times in favour of the Mac. For the new, fast G4-PowerMac processors from 400 MHz up we even had to slow down some Calamus functions (!) to enable them to be used at all.