UAE vs real A1200

[FastRobPlus]

Waccoon wrote:
[BTW, is it "disc" or "disk" with regards to floppies?
quote]

Disk is the magnetic term, and disc is the optical term.

[adonay]

Well i would not considder swaping your amiga with UAE .
whith my xp 3000 1g ram syspeed shows 68040 1500mhz whitch is total bull btw.I got major lags with mpeg files that i think is quite wierd with a 1500mhz 040 hehe.
Also doing work on uae does some times just jump out to windows wery unstabel memmory leak there some where ..
Well i tried UAE and thought it was quite bad and unstable bought a amiga instead..


 :-D  :-D adonay

[mdwh2]

detz wrote:
you only have to look at how poor the simple scrolling banner scrrensaver works to realise that windows can't move graphics about smoothly

I imagine the screen saver is just badly programmed.

Take a look at a 3D game. Given that any reasonably modern PC can render full 3D environments at hundreds of frames per second, then even if you did scrolling text by rendering texture mapped polygons in 3D, it ought to be perfectly smooth. In general, any 2D game can be done using 3D hardware, so the possible performance should be at least as smooth as what you see in a 3D game.

Now having said that, I don't know well UAE performs at AGA emulation, but it's simply not true to say that "Windows can't move graphics about smoothly".

[Cass]

BTW, is it "disc" or "disk" with regards to floppies?

For the floppies the right term is disk (as FastRobPlus correctly said :-D), an abbreviation of diskette (a name chosen in order to be similar to the word "cassette").

The word comes from the greek wich defines the flat circular geometric form. The Latin word is discus.

Here another explanation (From the Webster's Online Dictionary):

One reason for the distinction is perhaps that the compact disc was invented by Philips, a European company (hence using the British English spelling, disc), whereas the hard disk was invented by IBM, an American company (using the American English spelling, disk). The distinction is mostly found in hardware documentation and is rarely maintained in software documentation for users, where disk is almost always preferred in the interest of consistency.

 Another reason, explained in more detail in the external link, is that the audio field typically uses disc, whereas computer circles prefer disk. The CD was originally used solely for its audio applications. After the rise of the CD, some audiophiles began calling phonograph records black discs.

________
Bbw hairy

[Chunder]

@Cass

from the greek ÄÉÓÊÏÓ

:lol: I'm sure that hasn't come out as you intended :-)

@Desolator

No - my XP2500 (overclocked to XP3000+) gives me laggy sound with all versions of WinUAE so far. I never considered that it was a dodgy sound system (I'm using the onboard n-Force) - I thought that it was just a limitation of the emulation... time to have a play around tonight! :-)

[graffias79]

My laptop does not do well at all with UAE for audio.  I have no problen with my main PC's sound card (SB Audigy), but this laptop (Cirrus/Crystal AC'97) Plays chunks of soundbuffer at random (Updated the drivers and everything, no change  :-( )  I wonder if this will do the trick?  I also wonder if that could be made to work with an A1200?  Maybe not, just dreaming!  :-)

[Tomas]

Legerdemain wrote:

UAE might seem faster on pure cpu power and such, but try a game that really takes advantage of the amiga custom chipset, then you will see that it runs far from as smooth as on the real thing... A scroller game or demo is a real nice test for this.

This is very far from the truth. As long as you have what it takes, hardware-wise smooth scrolling will never be a problem. I seldom have to do more than to play around with the Hz, apply v-sync and voila. I did actually run Turrican II in my old 350MHz Compaq Presario under WinUAE smooth as silk. Never had any problems with this whatsoever on any "new" machine.

Quite odd that it wont run very smooth on any setting i have tried then.. I have tried both linux and windows version of uae, and cannot even get those games running completly as smooth as my a500 even after experimenting with different settings and enabling vsync..

Or is my amd xp2100, gf4 ti4200 more crappy than your 350mhz compaq?

What i experience can best be described as a dropped frame. The gfx might go quite smooth for a while, but then it suddently jerkes a bit. I have experienced this with pc games/demos aswell...

Maybe i am just a bit picky about such issues?

[Damion]

No - my XP2500 (overclocked to XP3000+) gives me laggy sound with all versions of WinUAE so far. I never considered that it was a dodgy sound system (I'm using the onboard n-Force) -

That may be your problem, n-force audio isn't very good, especially if you're using the analog outs.

I get great sound using a cheap SB Live! card with about 95% of the things I try, on occasion I'll have to mess with the soundbuffer but that's about it.

What i experience can best be described as a dropped frame. The gfx might go quite smooth for a while, but then it suddently jerkes a bit. I have experienced this with pc games/demos aswell...

Tomas that's really strange...it sounds to me like you may have a driver issue, though I entirely agree with you that some things in WinUAE are definately not perfect, you shouldn't be getting random stuttering, nor with PC games and demos.

-edit-

[spirantho]

mikrucio wrote:
and yes you better believe this emulation has come a long way. and it will replace your amiga in the near future.

That bit made me laugh.

Trust me, UAE won't be replacing any of my Amigas any time soon. It does run on one of them though (the AmigaOne).

And to all those people saying how great WinUAE is and how if you get choppy sound and stuff it's because it's not tweaked correctly, I say this:

1) My Amiga doesn't _need_ any settings to be tweaked. It just runs fine all the time, whether it be graphics or games or whatever.
2) How many times have you been using a real Amiga when all of a sudden the screen goes black and some horribly friendly dialogue box for a completely different app comes up?
3) UAE is a pig to set up for full-screen displays of the right size and right aspect ratios. I like to be able to switch between 1280x1024x32 to AGA PAL 320x256 and still have everything look right _without_ twiddling settings.
4) I like playing around with odd hardware. Can't fit a Zorro III card in a Windows box.

I have yet to see WinUAE run as smoothly as my Amiga on any system (and I've seen some quite good systems). I know my Amiga was way more expensive (Cyberstorm PPC, 68060@50/604e@200, Voodoo III) but that's not the argument. WinUAE is good - but it's not thatgood.

Any of my Amigas be replaced by WinUAE (which, incidentally, I do use regularly)? No thanks.

[SHADES]

@mikrucio

Actually, using the spare bits in the Paula chip used to set volume, you can trick up the sound to play 14 bit from memory. Takes a bit of tricky programming, but is most certainly possible. not bad for an 80's computer  :-D

[bloodline]

SHADES wrote:
@mikrucio

Actually, using the spare bits in the Paula chip used to set volume, you can trick up the sound to play 14 bit from memory. Takes a bit of tricky programming, but is most certainly possible. not bad for an 80's computer  :-D

That's called subranging... you take two channels, say 1 and 2 (that have the same physical output), then set one channel to 63 (maximum volume) and the other to a volume of 1. Then you play the upper 8bits of the 16bit sample through the maximum volume channel and the lower 8bits through the minimum volume channel.

It was cool 16 years ago, now it's just dumb.

[Legerdemain]

Quite odd that it wont run very smooth on any setting i have tried then.. I have tried both linux and windows version of uae, and cannot even get those games running completly as smooth as my a500 even after experimenting with different settings and enabling vsync..

Or is my amd xp2100, gf4 ti4200 more crappy than your 350mhz compaq?

What i experience can best be described as a dropped frame. The gfx might go quite smooth for a while, but then it suddently jerkes a bit. I have experienced this with pc games/demos aswell...

Maybe i am just a bit picky about such issues?

No, I'm most certainly as picky... I get furious every time a frame is skipped or whatever, though in most cases I work around this problem by playing around with the Hz in Windows also... WinUAE tends to "fake" the Hz that is used in the settings, which means that if you run Windows in 85Hz and WinUAE in 60Hz, the 60Hz is fitted within the 85Hz range which obviously makes some frames not syncing like they should, maybe this is DirectX related, I don't know. Furthermore there is this PAL/NTSC issue... if something is run in PAL 60Hz mode using NTSC 59.8Hz (or whatever it is) also results in a frame being skipped eventually. So, yes, there is a lot of tweaking needed to be done, but when it is done correctly it at least in my cases never have behaved annoyingly.

[Legerdemain]

1) My Amiga doesn't _need_ any settings to be tweaked. It just runs fine all the time, whether it be graphics or games or whatever.
2) How many times have you been using a real Amiga when all of a sudden the screen goes black and some horribly friendly dialogue box for a completely different app comes up?
3) UAE is a pig to set up for full-screen displays of the right size and right aspect ratios. I like to be able to switch between 1280x1024x32 to AGA PAL 320x256 and still have everything look right _without_ twiddling settings.
4) I like playing around with odd hardware. Can't fit a Zorro III card in a Windows box.

Considering that it is more or less impossible to work around some of the issues above when talking about emulation under Windows. Some issues are so obvious that one simply has to accept them or just decide not to use the emulator just because one can't handle the obvious consequences.

I have yet to see WinUAE run as smoothly as my Amiga on any system (and I've seen some quite good systems). I know my Amiga was way more expensive (Cyberstorm PPC, 68060@50/604e@200, Voodoo III) but that's not the argument. WinUAE is good - but it's not thatgood.

I do see your point, but it's not like there isn't issues with real AMiGA:s either. I've tried to come up with a good solution on switching between RTG/AGA in a smooth way on my A1200. Bought myself a flickerfixer/scandoubler and thought that was nice... until I realised I had to get a monitorswitch aswell, and then suddenly the quality of the signal will be somewhat less unless some big money is spent.  And even after a monitorswitch is bought, there will be some delays when switching the screens and the AGA frequencies are still rather low so that some monitors don't support them and so on, and so on. I've yet no had this really pleasant experience with handling AGA/RTG on the same screen on a real AMiGA, and in some cases WinUAE does that better.

In the end, what it all comes down to is how one wants to use the AMiGA. In some cases I prefer WinUAE, in some cases i prefer the real thing. They both have advantages.

[spirantho]

In the end, what it all comes down to is how one wants to use the AMiGA. In some cases I prefer WinUAE, in some cases i prefer the real thing. They both have advantages.

Absolutely. That's why it annoys me when someone says that UAE is better than an Amiga in every way - it's simply not. They both are good for their own purposes.

Incidentally, you can get round your problem with RTG/AGA if you buy a graphics card with a pass-through. I ran my A4000 on a CV64 for a while and that worked fine.

If only WinUAE supported AmigaOS 4... then it would be better still, and I could develop for it when away from home. That's the real problem with UAE for me... it's emulating 11 year old technology, while the new Amigas are far in advance of that and still moving. UAE is the past, the (new) hardware has a future, and everybody solely using UAE is stuck in the past while we're trying to push on into the future....