jMax's problems were even worse than what you say. The messagesystem (which we used for video) couldn't run clickfree either, with hiccups longer than 100 ms! and i'm not sure that they were fixable by adding an extra CPU.
-There is a big misunderstanding about the purpose for what jMax was designed in the first place: a replacement for the Ircam Signal Processing Workstation a.k.a ISPW. Period. At that time approx. 1991-1995 signal processing meant in their terminology: audio-processing. This was done previously with dedicated processors:DSP's. Subsequently it became possibleto this with general CPU's like PPC, MIPS, UltraSparc. etc., etc., etc... Intel had a lousy reputation in this. They later on discovered there was a market for this so up comes MMX, SSE...
IRCAM wanted a 'virtual ISPW' and found this at that time in SGI machines with multiple cpu's and the OS (Irix) that offered, through the REACT extensions, an adequate realtime response (under 20 milliseconds...), hence jMax. Therefore the controlling host became a Java-gui on cpu 1 and all the signal processing stuff were put on other cpu's. Now under Irix you can assign these functions to different processors, because REACT allows you to do so. Thus if you wanted to do video use a separate processor!
However one can question whether it was a clever thing to do this seperation, on the other hand with current dualcore processors becoming standard for the next couple of years, maybe it ought to be revived. Perhaps somebody ought to contact Francois Dechelle in advance.. I think, by the way, IRCAM could have supported it slightly more decently with their lists.
AvS
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` |Schreck Ensemble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +
` |# -laboratory for live electro-acoustic music- # |
| http://www.schreck.nl/ |
| http://www.xs4all.nl/~schreck/ |
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` |Compositions http://www.xs4all.nl/~schreck/html/compo.html |
` |Samples http://www.xs4all.nl/~schreck/html/samp.html |
` |Patches http://www.xs4all.nl/~schreck/html/pat.html |
` |Videos http://www.xs4all.nl/~schreck/html/video.html |
` |Scores http://www.xs4all.nl/~schreck/html/scores.html |
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