Negative-working imageable elements can be imaged and processed to provide lithographic printing plates. When a processor generates an access request for the memory device, the predicted one of the instructions stored in the instruction buffer is provided to the system bus for receipt by the processor upon determining that the predicted one of the instructions stored in the instruction buffer hits the access request from the processor. For scan based testing, the time event and waveform generator is programmed between test pattern scan sequences by serial loading from the test pattern memory.