DLL Best Practices

Creating Win32 DLLs may seem rather easy, however there are many subtle things to take in account (loader deadlocks are unknown by many Win32 developers)

Here’s a very good read for the topic:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/kernel/DLL_bestprac.mspx

Hackint0sh Xbench 1.3 results

The XBench 1.3 results for my AMD X2 5200 system are:

Test            Score
===========================================================
CPU             95.98
Thread          174.32
Memory          138.36
Quartz          176.39
OpenGL          130.86
UI              304.50
Disk            58.41
OVERALL         122.50

Of course that even middle range MacPros perform better… but hey … this is a pretty standard computer by this time and works with Leopard very well. I think disk performance may be quite not as high as I wanted… probably it’s related to the SerialATA controller being setup as IDE-emulation, not AHCI which effectively disables NCQ for example. But I need to install AHCI on Windows XP — if I setup that I will try again to see if I can improve  the disk score.

Hackintosh successfully setup at home

I’ve successfully setup my own Hackintosh computer using Leo4All 4.1.1 DVD (AMD-only). My systems specs are:

• AMD Athlon X2 5200+ Dual Core processor
• 2048 MB DDR2-667 RAM
• 320GB HD Samsung (321LJ), SATA2
• NForce4 570 Chipset, Motherboard MSI K9N Neo
• GeForce 7300GT, 512MB
• Samsung 932N Plus 19″ LCD display

System is running very stable (10.5.4 now).

For all 512MB Nvidia users: you may need to patch and reflash your board ROM. It does allow Darwin kernel to detect all the RAM of your card — in fact, the only method I found to make this 7300GT board to run with acceleration was to touch it’s ROM and reflash. Dangerous, but only if you modify the wrong bytes.

In the next post, XBench results — let’s see how my machine compares to the Mac Pros!