Help with Amiga emulation speed, please

[johnklos]

I'm looking for help with obtaining the best performing Amiga emulation. I've posted a thread on Reddit here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/4r3sbx/emulation_speed_help_needed/

Thoughts and feedback, either here or there, are most welcome. Thanks!

[danbeaver]

Have you thought of a more powerful Amiga? One with a 68060?  Or using an Amiga NG?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

A 2.2GHz I7 and you're only getting 1/2 the speed of an A1200 w/68060?  I don't know jack about emulation but I'd assume you have something drastically misconfigured with your emulator for that to be the case. That or maybe emulation just sucks, lol.

[zipper]

That slowness is because of emulating without JIT. A quick test on my setup is showing Sysinfo mips drop 80% and mlops drop by 92% without JIT.

[Ral-Clan]

A couple of things:

In my experience, WinUAE is faster than FS-UAE.  FS-UAE is not bad, but WinUAE is just a little better.  I believe that FS-UAE is based off of WinUAE emulation code anyway, so FS-UAE is always catching up to WinUAE.  On my old single core PentiumD computer I was able to get an amazingly smooth, super fast Amiga experience (faster than 060) using WinUAE.  I absolutely loved it - and I was using it for productivity work like Lightwave, PageStream, MIDI music sequencing, ImageFX, etc. besides gaming.

I have since switched to Linux and now my only option is to use FS-UAE.  While it's not bad - it's certainly not as fast as WinUAE.  FS-UAE only recently properly implemented JIT.  Also, it has problems with the Intel graphics chip on my motherboard (WinUAE under Windows XP didn't) and so the rendering of RTG screens has some latency and choppiness (I can see a lag in the mouse pointer movement) whereas WinUAE under Windows was absolutely perfect.  I therefore keep a dual boot system and one of the few reasons I have to boot anymore into Windows is to use WinUAE.

I hear that some Linux users install WinUAE under WINE because it's faster/better than FS-UAE (even though WinUAE takes a bit of a performance hit being run through WINE).

Besides using JIT, your emulation speed will be GREATLY increased if you use the special WinUAE Picasso 96 driver from withing AmigaOS when running in RTG modes.

Also, try playing with the graphics rendering modes in the FS-UAE settings. The OpenGL modes, etc. Some of these are much faster than the others.

[johnklos]

danbeaver: I have an Amiga 1200 with a 60 MHz m68060, and I'd like my emulations to be at least as fast. AmigaNG don't run m68k NetBSD.

Oldsmobile_Mike: Yes, emulation is not great, and not being able to use JIT makes a huge difference.

ral-clan: WINE doesn't really emulate as much as it just calls native OS code via translation from Windows code. This translation adds minimal overhead, if it's like GNU/Linux ABI emulation on NetBSD / FreeBSD. This is how BSDs can be faster at running GNU/Linux programs than GNU/Linux sometimes.

https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#Is_Wine_slower_than_just_using_Windows.3F

Likewise, there's very little CPU overhead for a guest OS in VirtualBox, so that shouldn't be an issue.

You're right about graphics - both emulated Amiga graphics and any graphics translations between VirtualBox or WINE and the host OS impact performance, but I have that set to minimum (skip frames, turn off collision detection, et cetera) because I don't use graphics for more than just a text screen and plan to run them headless.

I should clarify - what I wrote was wrong. My Windows 7 virtual machine is set up with the latest WinUAE, not FS-UAE, and FS-UAE under OS X is definitely faster than WinUAE on the same hardware. I'll play with settings more.