whdload vs. WinUAE for classic Amiga Games

[coldfish]

Roondar wrote:

So, concluding:

Yes, WinUAE is surely faster and more convenient than using a real Amiga (with or without HD).

No, WinUAE does not give the same smoothness for scrolling and missing digital joysticks sucks. Not too mention it always looks more blocky than on a TV  ;-)

(And somehow, even on my PIV 3.2Ghz there are still Amiga programs -mostly those that really bang the hardware- that struggle to reach A500 speeds in WinUAE)

Ahh, godblessya, I think the scrolling problems have more to do with the faster (lower persistence) PC display device than emulation, I run WinUAE through a HTPC & SDTV setup, it's just like the old days.

I use a Sidewinder digital pad which is just as good if not better than the old Sega-MS pad I used with my A1200.

The HTPC is a Duron @1Ghz, it does a fine job of emulating an A500, I think you should check your settings/configs if your having speed issues with a P4 @ 3.2Ghz?  Or prhaps try an older, faster, (less accurate) version, Im running 0.8.8r8 and 0.9.91.0.

[Roondar]

coldfish wrote:

Ahh, godblessya, I think the scrolling problems have more to do with the faster (lower persistence) PC display device than emulation, I run WinUAE through a HTPC & SDTV setup, it's just like the old days.

I don't think monitor persistance is the problem. I'll have a look at TV out, but I don't expect an improvement*. Methinks you're just used to the WinUAE output -like I was- and therefore just not notice the lack of smoothness. I didn't until I fired up my old Amiga after all.

*) The problem has to do with how WinUAE builds it's display, which is nothing like how a real Amiga does it's trick.

I use a Sidewinder digital pad which is just as good if not better than the old Sega-MS pad I used with my A1200.

Like I said, IMHO a joypad is an inherently inferior control method for Amiga games. Nothing beats an old fashioned digital stick for precision movement.

The HTPC is a Duron @1Ghz, it does a fine job of emulating an A500, I think you should check your settings/configs if your having speed issues with a P4 @ 3.2Ghz?  Or prhaps try an older, faster, (less accurate) version, Im running 0.8.8r8 and 0.9.91.0.

Try some really copper/blitter intensive games/demos. It will crawl. The makers even say so themselves  :-)

Note that I don't believe a smooth Duron 1Ghz to begin with, the first PC I ever saw (and that was using a heavilly tweaked WinUAE config and 8bit colour setting -which is not good enough for an A500, there are plenty of games that beat 256 colours on screen-) that made 50fps without skipping was some 2Ghz Athlon based PC. WinUAE performance has always been heavilly overrated in Amiga land*.

*) When it was 'young' people claimed non-skipping A500 speeds on a K6-2 450Mhz. Which I had. With their configuration files I did get 100% speed, but they used a frameskip of 3 or 4 to get there. Ofcourse for applications the performance quickly reached (and later broke) Amiga speeds, but games where a different thing alltogether. Especially those which really banged the hardware. Or where written in AMOS  :lol:

[coldfish]

Well, I can only vouch for my own experience with WinUAE.

Regardless of whether you believe it or not this little Duron based HTPC runs an emulated A500 just fine, no frameskip, no sound skipping.  I can only guess you're doing something wrong or running stuff that would hobble a real A500?  Or perhaps its time for a Win reinstall?  :-P

According to Amiga Forever:

http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/3-101.html

"While many users are satisfied with the performance of the emulation low-end systems such as those powered by Pentium 90 to Pentium 200 CPUs, we recommend a Pentium processor running at 750 MHz as a minimum configuration. This provides a quite usable environment, roughly comparable to the speed of an Amiga 500 with a fast hard disk, inclusive of custom chips emulation. In this configuration, the emulated CPU can be several times as fast as that of an A500, while the Amiga chip set is emulated in real time in most usage scenarios (including most games).

With emulation running on Intel Pentium CPUs, the original performance of the Amiga chip-set is achieved in the range between 400 MHz and 1 GHz, depending on the resources used by the software (games are the most demanding applications). In comparison, the performance of CPU-intensive Amiga tasks on newer and more powerful GHz-class PCs can be defined as stunning: jobs which used to take minutes or hours on "real" Amiga systems only take seconds when run inside the emulation. Additional performance comparisons are included in the FAQ list, and in the section on Emulation."

Give me some examples of games that "crawl" and I'll try them out myself.  I have no doubt there are demos that will stress the system and maybe even cause a frame-drop now and then but I'm yet to come across anything that causes it to "crawl".

I really cant criticise WinUAE for features and performance.

...did I mention its free! :-)

[Roondar]

coldfish wrote:
Well, I can only vouch for my own experience with WinUAE.

Regardless of whether you believe it or not this little Duron based HTPC runs an emulated A500 just fine, no frameskip, no sound skipping.  I can only guess you're doing something wrong or running stuff that would hobble a real A500?  Or perhaps its time for a Win reinstall?  :-P

Well, I'm ofcourse happy for you that all seems well. Strange that my Athlon 1Ghz of yesteryear never got anywhere near the performance in WinUAE as you claim to get but I'll leave it at that.

On to what I do with it: Nothing much, all A500 stuff really. And no, windows is not to blame -everything else runs blazingly fast and rightly so-.

Now, it is ofcourse possible my WinUAE setup has a wrong configuration for perfect performance.

Then again, my idea of emulation is that it had better be as close to the original as possibe so setting up UAE with subpar configuration options to increase the speed at cost of precision is a no-no in my mind*.

The JIT for instance is very acceptable, but disabling VSync is not. Nor is any other option that purposely reduces the emulation accuracy to gain speed (such as an 8 bit display or a large soundbuffer which causes audio lag).

I'm really picky about my emulators, you should see how much effort I put into getting WinVice to run right! :lol:

*) I actually consider claiming perfect framerates for an emulator while doing such things a form of cheating, it's only 'perfect' when it also does everything it has to do!

According to Amiga Forever:

http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/3-101.html

Interesting text, but it does come from the people who want to sell you Amiga Forever, naturally they will claim it works rather well.

Now I will agree that for most games and apps a 1Ghz PC is plenty, but I had plenty of PC's and versions of WinUAE myself and only those of really high spec could run the Emulator at a level that I'd call acceptable.

I do have Amiga Forever offcourse, but not because of the claimed emulation speeds :-)

Give me some examples of games that "crawl" and I'll try them out myself.  I have no doubt there are demos that will stress the system and maybe even cause a frame-drop now and then but I'm yet to come across anything that causes it to "crawl".

Crawl is a subjective thing, for me that point is allready reached when a game drops enough frames for it to be noticable or when it starts lagging a tad.

I'll have to look for the names of the demo's, but I recall that the last time I ran Turrican I's Scrolling levels it started dropping frames. Same with Shadow of the Beast and some other stuff.

I really cant criticise WinUAE for features and performance.

...did I mention its free! :-)

WinUAE certainly is a fine product, but not free tho unless you allready have an Amiga, copying a Kickstart ROM without owning the original is illegal after all.

And there is but one way to get a legal Kickstart ROM if you don't have an Amiga. Which most definitely costs money  ;-)

[jimmy_n]

One thing that bugs me playing games on WinUAE, is that on my  monitor, I either have to use 800x600 and have a big black border round the screen, or 640x480 and have the bottom of the screen cut off (or more for games that use overscan).

[SamuraiCrow]

...or run it in a window.

[Roondar]

Seriously, why would someone trying to relive the old Amiga feeling want to run his game in a window?

Way to kill the atmosphere!

[coldfish]

Its possible your preference for accuracy over speed it the problem.  I dont bother with 100% sound accuracy and dont mind tweaking down compatability when using WinUAE on my old Compaq E500 @ 600Mhz.  On the HTPC I dont need to.  Another nice thing is the HTPC has 768 x 576 and 720 x 576 output for that authentic, everything in it's right place Amiga experience.

Accuracy vs Speed is one of those things.  Some people prefer older versions of Mame becuase newer versions make their emulation crawl, I dont mind using neoRageX instead of Mame to run NeoGeo stuff, eventhough it's less "accurate", the overall gaming experience is still fun and there's no framedrops and no soundskips, which is the number one spoiler imo.

Ironically, shooting for accuracy may be why your having trouble getting WinUAE to run at full clip on a 3.2Ghz machine.  It's probably best you stick with a real A500, 1084s and a box of floppies. :-P

[MAD]

Hoya!

Amiga+WHDLoad all the way!!!

Be funky

M A D

[Roondar]

coldfish wrote:
Its possible your preference for accuracy over speed it the problem.  I dont bother with 100% sound accuracy and dont mind tweaking down compatability when using WinUAE on my old Compaq E500 @ 600Mhz.  On the HTPC I dont need to.  Another nice thing is the HTPC has 768 x 576 and 720 x 576 output for that authentic, everything in it's right place Amiga experience.

Accuracy vs Speed is one of those things.  Some people prefer older versions of Mame becuase newer versions make their emulation crawl, I dont mind using neoRageX instead of Mame to run NeoGeo stuff, eventhough it's less "accurate", the overall gaming experience is still fun and there's no framedrops and no soundskips, which is the number one spoiler imo.

Ironically, shooting for accuracy may be why your having trouble getting WinUAE to run at full clip on a 3.2Ghz machine.  It's probably best you stick with a real A500, 1084s and a box of floppies. :-P

Or in my case a choice between an A600 with CompactFlash HDD and a towerised A1200 with accelerator etc :-)

Anyway, I think in the end it does come down to personal oppinion and feeling more than any technical merits. WinUAE is a fine piece of software and if you like using it, go right ahead. If you're like me you'll probably find that an original Amiga can't be beat in terms of how close it is to the original tho :-P

On the emulators thing: I actually don't mind not-so-accurate emulation for systems I haven't owned/own.

Somehow I always get very picky when I emulate something I have in my own home 'for real'. One of the reasons I disliked the Playstation emulators for instance was that the sound was always 'off' a tad. In the end I just used my PS2 to play PS1 games, even though the emulator gave me higher res and faster loading.

[Legerdemain]

To me the choice is rather simple: the original hardware.

WinUAE is way too buggy, and emulation isn't synchronized in such a way that it really feels like running a real Amiga (especially not when running Workbench). Some things emulates way too fast and some things go way too slow which makes Workbench feel rather... 'surreal'. On some systems WinUAE seems to behave, on others it simply refuses to do pretty much anything the way it was meant to be done. Annyoing, to say the least.

However, I have been nothing but impressed with the performance of WinUAE, speedwise. On my old Compaq Presario 350MHz, 192MB RAM, running Windows XP... every single game I tried to run, OCS/ECS aswell as AGA, ran in perfect 50Hz/60Hz with no frameskip whatsoever (perfect only when having turned on VSync, of course). The only thing that disturbed me back then, game-emulation-wise, was Windows inability to show PAL-screenmodes on a CRT monitor, because using the 'filter' option, streching out the screen on a higher resolution, let's say 1280*1024, isn't really the same thing as the real thing.

Besides, when using the 'filter' option while running WB in native screenmodes, it sometimes feels like the JIT-emaultion is turned off. The system slows down to a crawl, and this have been true for all of the different systems I've tried running WinUAE on.

[Legerdemain]

Somehow I always get very picky when I emulate something I have in my own home 'for real'. One of the reasons I disliked the Playstation emulators for instance was that the sound was always 'off' a tad. In the end I just used my PS2 to play PS1 games, even though the emulator gave me higher res and faster loading.

I don't know what emulators you've used, but ePSXe must be one of the worst emulators in the world simply because it is beyond 'not user-friendly'. I don't know how many hours I spent on configurating the emulator to properly run FFIX, but then I released that... oh, well... now some other games doesn't run all that well. There are a ZILLION different plugins, which works best with Game A, Game B, Game C and so on and it is nothing but a nightmare to configure most of the gfx-plugins...

I really HATE ePSXe. Not for being a bad emulator, because it isn't, but for being one of the most not-user-friendly emulators I have ever used.

I thought I was about to cry when I downloaded pSX 1.5, started the emulator, started a game, and had to do practically had to do NIL configuration... put the bios in the correct directory, define my controller, select NTSC or PAL and turn on the V-Sync option. And then start the emulation. Although not making the 3D high-res, it must be the most user-friendly PS emulator I have ever ran. I don't know about compitability, though, but so far only Tekken 3 have managed to crash on me.

[coldfish]

Roondar wrote:

Or in my case a choice between an A600 with CompactFlash HDD and a towerised A1200 with accelerator etc :-)

Anyway, I think in the end it does come down to personal oppinion and feeling more than any technical merits. WinUAE is a fine piece of software and if you like using it, go right ahead. If you're like me you'll probably find that an original Amiga can't be beat in terms of how close it is to the original tho :-P

On the emulators thing: I actually don't mind not-so-accurate emulation for systems I haven't owned/own.

Somehow I always get very picky when I emulate something I have in my own home 'for real'. One of the reasons I disliked the Playstation emulators for instance was that the sound was always 'off' a tad. In the end I just used my PS2 to play PS1 games, even though the emulator gave me higher res and faster loading.

Dont get me wrong, nothing matches real hardware for the complete experience.  Ive had an A500 and an A1200 running Whdload with stacks of old A500 stuff installed.  It was all good for a long time, but after a while I noticed WinUAE was quicker and more convienient for the quick hack, esp' as the host PC was already on.  The "real" hardware with slow loading times, dodgy floppies and compatability issues eventually went in the closet.  Btw, it's arguable that running an A500 game on an A1200 using Whdload is unauthentic and inaccurate too. :-P

Btw, I tried both SOTB and Turrican today on the HTPC, with maxed sound settings 100%, 48kHz ect. Maxed compatability, Display; Vsync on, 16bit(ofcourse), 720x576 fullscreen ect ect...

Turrican ran smooth, SOTB had maybe (maybe!) a slight stutter on the top (foremost and fastest) layer of the parallax scrolling, otherwise smooth.  I cant say the latter quibble made it unplayable.  ;-)

Youre right, it comes down to personal opinion and what's fun for you; someone who enjoys the hardware side is never going to like an emulation, someone who just wants a quick thrash of some old favourites wont be too fussed.

Having said that, the floppy drive "click" feature is a nice authentic touch.  

[Legerdemain]

Btw, I tried both SOTB and Turrican today on the HTPC, with maxed sound settings 100%, 48kHz ect. Maxed compatability, Display; Vsync on, 16bit(ofcourse), 720x576 fullscreen ect ect...

Oh, so you ran 720x576 without any filtering turned on, using H&V centering to achieve the most 'real' experience on your TV-set?

I just have to ask you, how do you do to define a 720x576 screenmode (and what gfx-card do you have) because I've been wanting to define my own resolution for a long time on my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro & Radeon 9600... but I haven't figured out a way to do so.

[Roondar]

coldfish wrote:

Btw, it's arguable that running an A500 game on an A1200 using Whdload is unauthentic and inaccurate too. :-P

Oh you could indeed argue that. Quite rightly since it loads a whole bunch of times faster and gone are the diskswaps.

That said it's still more accurate than WinUAE doing the same thing  :-D

(And secondly my A600 is the prime WHDLoad target, I use my A1200 for AGA games so I am running my games on the chipset they where orginally coded for :-P)

[coldfish]

Legerdemain wrote:
Oh, so you ran 720x576 without any filtering turned on, using H&V centering to achieve the most 'real' experience on your TV-set?

I just have to ask you, how do you do to define a 720x576 screenmode (and what gfx-card do you have) because I've been wanting to define my own resolution for a long time on my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro & Radeon 9600... but I haven't figured out a way to do so.

The HTPC has a Gf2-GTS gfx card with a Chrontel TV chip, connected to my TV by RGB/Scart.  I use TV-Tool to output from the card at 720x576 or 768x576.  I did have to modify the card for RGB-TV as per the instructions on the TV-Tool website and it takes a little tweaking to get the resolutions working right.  Different TV chips produce different results, I hunted this one down on ebay specifically for this purpose.

Try TV-Tool anyway, you may be able to get PAL&NTSC resolutions working?

http://tvtool.info/index_e.htm

Also, try Powerstrip:

http://entechtaiwan.net/util/ps.shtm