Sweet16 2.1.1 makes Macs happy

August 05, 2009 at 08:46 PM
I’ve just released Sweet16 2.1.1, a nice little update that fixes a few bugs, and includes a couple of changes that reduce CPU overhead on the host Macintosh substantially. Here’s an overview of what’s changed:

  • The main event loop now does sleeps instead of busy-loops, dramatically reducing wasted CPU cycles; Sweet16 plays much more nicely with other running processes now.
  • Rewrote the video timing code to be more precise.
  • Removed some unnecessary mutual exclusion code in the networking support, speeding up networking substantially.
  • The Create Disk Image panel now lets you choose a disk image format on Mac OS X 10.4; previously this popup window didn’t do anything prior to Mac OS X 10.5.
  • The SpiderMonkey JavaScript runtime is now weak-linked, so that Sweet16 really does now run on PowerPC G3 systems (albeit without debugger support).
  • Creating disk images of even 1 MB sizes (5 MB, 10 MB, 32 MB, 100 MB, for example) now goes much, much faster, since instead of writing out 512 bytes at a time, these are written 1 MB at a time. A future update will provide a similar performance improvement for floppy size image creation.
  • Clicks in the video window are no longer ignored when the System Information window is open.
  • Enabled some new optimizations that noticeably improves performance on PowerPC systems.
  • Removed some unnecessary debug output.
  • The Create Disk Image panel now lets you create DiskCopy 4.2 images at 1.4 MB.
  • The Create Disk Image panel’s size popup no longer wanders out of view when you resize the panel.
  • Memory no longer gets leaked when controls in the Create Disk Image and Create Emupack file panels are clicked on.
  • Reworded the alert that appears when trying to mount a CD-ROM when no CD-ROM is found, since the same alert is used both when there is no CD-ROM media available as well as when there is no CD-ROM drive available.
I sure hope you like this new version!

Visit the download page!