Is there any real use for 128MB on classic Amiga?

[motrucker]

Sorry, I should have realized that. Gawd, am I getting that serious these days?

[bloodline]

Sorry, I should have realized that. Gawd, am I getting that serious these days?

20 years of disappointment will do that to a guy!

[Britelite]

Can you run the timing test on your system and lemme know what you get?

Ok, now I've tried it

1. unlha it. (time how long this takes)  This is just for fun since someone mentioned it earlier.

Unpacking took around 3:30min

2. Run the game.  This means double click its icon and start your stopwatch.  stop the stopwatch when the blackish screen comes up that allows you to enter your wizard names and teams.  This is for historial purposes.  Just interesting.  The first time the game runs, all the audio in the game must be decompressed.  Its thousands of files, loads of disk thrashing.

Took 3:10min

4. Double click the game icon and start your stopwatch.  When the black screen with the wizard names and teams comes up. stop the stopwatch.  This is the meaninful test because this is what the player experiences every time he loads the game.  All that other stuff was just a once in a lifetime thing.

After installation and running the first time this took about 5 seconds. After I reset WinUAE and tried it a few times it took 5-8 seconds.

Be sure to say the hardware you used. what kind of Drive, HD?  what size?  SSD?  Is ur drive on SATA 300 OR SATA 600 or PATA ?  How many Ghz you have?  How many cores?  the usual stuff.

My machine is an old Pentium4, ~3GHz and single core. Old regular (not SSD) 160GB SATA harddrive which hasn't been defragmented in ages. 5 year old WinXP installation and WinUAE 2.4.1

[billt]

Remember that there is and was more to Amiga computing than just games on a floppy disk or two.

[ChaosLord]

@BriteLite
Interesting that u got faster times than the other guys....

Was your AGA emu on?
Was your PAULA emu on?

Did the gfx look right?

Music sounded ok?

I wonder if yours loaded faster than his because you had 040 set.  020 and 030 (+FPU) are supposed to be fastest.... :confused:

If 040 is faster then 060 should be even fastererer

What filessystem did u run the game from?

Did u unlha the game from within your amiga?
Or did u unla from outside your Amiga with 7zip?


I will get brand new 3.1Ghz bgcpc and try this myself at some point.

[derringer3]

Until to get os4 or using serious app you don't need. But As i remembered for example browsing with OWB under os4 classic eat up your memory to the limit. Also If you want to play Battle of wesnoth you need to kick all of the tasks or end up with slide show because out of memory effect.

[Britelite]

@BriteLite
Interesting that u got faster times than the other guys....

Was your AGA emu on?

Yes, AGA emulation is turned on

Was your PAULA emu on?

Of course, no point in playing games or watching demos without sound

Did the gfx look right?

Yes, they looked fine

Music sounded ok?

The music sounded good

I wonder if yours loaded faster than his because you had 040 set.  020 and 030 (+FPU) are supposed to be fastest.... :confused:

If 040 is faster then 060 should be even fastererer

The 060 option doesn't speed up anything, as it really doesn't emulate a 060.

What filessystem did u run the game from?

I've mounted a directory in Windows as a harddrive (instead of using a hardfile), so that might actually speed up loading times.

Did u unlha the game from within your amiga?

Yes, I used lha 2.12

I can share my WinUAE configuration-file, if you want to try it yourself.

[som99]

I've mounted a directory in Windows as a harddrive (instead of using a hardfile), so that might actually speed up loading times.

I've noticed this myself when using dopus,  at least I think it's quicker, I have never measured it but it feels quicker.

[ChaosLord]

The 060 option doesn't speed up anything, as it really doesn't emulate a 060.

But "The 040 option doesn't speed up anything, as it really doesn't emulate a 040.", right?

I've mounted a directory in Windows as a harddrive (instead of using a hardfile), so that might actually speed up loading times.

AHA!  u cheated!

I appreciate ur test results and everything but as the NTFS dirs option has multiple bugs that corrupt the game, it does not count.

Unless Toni fixed the bugs in the intervening years (4?).  It has been quite some years since I documented the bugs so it is possible.  Yes it acted like more than one bug iirc.

All I can say is that until I can certify that all NTFS dir bugs have been fixed, timing tests have to be done from some kind of hardfile.  FFS, SFS, PFS3, or some other more exotic one.  Hardfiles are supposed to be pretty fast.  I would be very interested to see your times from a hardfile, to see how much difference it makes, if any.

I am wondering how PFS3 compares to SFS compares to FFS 4k compares to FFS 16k.

I wanted to release Total Chaos on an FFS 4K hardfile way back before PFS3 was released for free.  But I was in horrible pain and could do absolutely nothing but watch the world go by all these years.

I have now recovered just a little bit to the point that I can write a few forum msgs here and there, but I hafta be real careful not to over do it.

Anyway I figured a FFS 4K or 16K with a bunch of Addbuffers would really whoopass. :cool:  But now PFS3 is out and that throws a monkey wrench into my plans for world domination :kitty:

I can share my WinUAE configuration-file, if you want to try it yourself.

Maybe later after I have my new 3.1Ghz quad-core WinUAE machine set up.  I bought it for the purpose of performing as close to a 50Mhz real Amiga (or better) as possible.  I would love for it to solidly go at 100Mhz speed but I have never seen it do that.   I have a few ideas for making WinUAE go faster.  We shall see.

[Crumb]

Whdload machines seems to be ok with 2-4 MB of ram.

ham8 cdxl pr0n

[AmigaClassicRule]

But "The 040 option doesn't speed up anything, as it really doesn't emulate a 040.", right?
 
 
AHA! u cheated!
 
I appreciate ur test results and everything but as the NTFS dirs option has multiple bugs that corrupt the game, it does not count.
 
Unless Toni fixed the bugs in the intervening years (4?). It has been quite some years since I documented the bugs so it is possible. Yes it acted like more than one bug iirc.
 
All I can say is that until I can certify that all NTFS dir bugs have been fixed, timing tests have to be done from some kind of hardfile. FFS, SFS, PFS3, or some other more exotic one. Hardfiles are supposed to be pretty fast. I would be very interested to see your times from a hardfile, to see how much difference it makes, if any.
 
I am wondering how PFS3 compares to SFS compares to FFS 4k compares to FFS 16k.
 
I wanted to release Total Chaos on an FFS 4K hardfile way back before PFS3 was released for free. But I was in horrible pain and could do absolutely nothing but watch the world go by all these years.
 
I have now recovered just a little bit to the point that I can write a few forum msgs here and there, but I hafta be real careful not to over do it.
 
Anyway I figured a FFS 4K or 16K with a bunch of Addbuffers would really whoopass. :cool: But now PFS3 is out and that throws a monkey wrench into my plans for world domination :kitty:
 
 
 
 
 
Maybe later after I have my new 3.1Ghz quad-core WinUAE machine set up. I bought it for the purpose of performing as close to a 50Mhz real Amiga (or better) as possible. I would love for it to solidly go at 100Mhz speed but I have never seen it do that. I have a few ideas for making WinUAE go faster. We shall see.

Sometimes when I disable sound in WinUAE it goes SO fast that double clicking an icon no longer register.

[ChaosLord]

Took 3:10min

My machine is an old Pentium4, ~3GHz and single core. Old regular (not SSD) 160GB SATA harddrive which hasn't been defragmented in ages. 5 year old WinXP installation and WinUAE 2.4.1

Based on the time to unpack all the audio files your 3000Mhz pc runs at the speed of a 100Mhz 060.  Or you could say it runs at about the speed of a 50Mhz 060 which has been connected to 50Mhz SRAM.

This is either good or bad depending on how you look at it.

I was really hoping for more speed than that.

I need 400Mhz 060 power to do the things I want in a game.

I really want to add in .mp3 playback for the WinUAE edition.  But if all ppl can get is 100Mhz 060 speed.... playing a .mp3 will place a huge strain on the game.  (remember the game has a zillion other things it has to do besides the music).

I also want to add .xm and .s3m  16-32 channel mod support.  But once again these can really drink CPU power.

We have actually supported 64 channel med mods for many many years but never really used them as too many ppl are playing the game on sloooooooooow 030s which just can't deal with 64 channel mods and an entire game with heavy animation at the same time.

P.s. what is your frameskip set to?

[TheBilgeRat]

Thanxx0rz dude!  I was starting to get bummed about the whole thing.  Your Raise Dead spell has revived me

Ok the thing about those videos is that the guy who made them did them on a 780Mhz Laptop so, some of the choppiness might be YouTube's fault but a lot of it is the guy's computer just plain chops the hell out of the anims.  Speeds up, slows down, lots of frames of animation go missing here and there, sound is not always in sync...  I hate it

I offered to make him a special version of the game with anims that play in super slow motion so that none of the frames would go missing (no more jarring steps) but he was not interested so I kinda forgot about it.

Now that I just bought myself a brand new 3.1Ghz bgcpc I might possibly make some videos of my own, where the gfx are all there and in sync with the sound so it will at least look and sound like it does in real life (hopefully)...  I have no idea how to record such a video but at least now I have the equipment.

To the best of my knowledge (which is not very far or anything) Total Chaos was the very first playable game on YouTube.  You can actually play it on YouTube.  Yeah its amazingly simplistic compared to the real game and honestly might make you hate the game for how simple the YouTube version is,  but it "works".

AGA: 1992 Lives Forever

This reminds me of a video I watched of one of the Fallout team members discussing the making of the original Fallout and how he pushed hard to make it a 640x480 game (which was unheard of at the time).  Its a fascinating vid - but the piece out of it that got my attention was that the artists had done full VERY hires graphics for all the textures, anims, etc, that were cut down in color and size to actually run on a P1 90Mhz with 16Megs or 32 megs of ram.  It would be amazing if that game was re-released with the full sized and 24 bit color graphics.

Dang it - I can't find it on the youtube.  Anyways - the long and short is I love old games because they have nostalgic value, but I sure like games at 1900x1080x24 with photorealistc images, waving grass, water effects, and plot as well.

[Britelite]

Based on the time to unpack all the audio files your 3000Mhz pc runs at the speed of a 100Mhz 060.  Or you could say it runs at about the speed of a 50Mhz 060 which has been connected to 50Mhz SRAM.

You shouldn't base your assumptions of speed on anything related to diskaccesses. CPU-operations are WAAAAAY beyond anything an 060 can achieve (which usually leads to disappointments when an demoeffect I'm coding is running smoothly in WinUAE and runs like crap on my 060 Amiga

P.s. what is your frameskip set to?

No frameskips

[Tripitaka]

It would be amazing if that game was re-released with the full sized and 24 bit color graphics

I run Fallout with the Hi-res patch at 1024X600 on my netbook (it plays very well on a netbook) but of course the Hi-res patch is only really giving me a bigger window. I would love to see a release the way you said. I'de be happier still if it was an Amiga port. We can but dream.

[NovaCoder]

20 years of disappointment will do that to a guy!

Sounds like the Amiga scene then

You never know, maybe one day......