What is the real power of Akiko chip in cd32 ?

[Akiko]

Wing Commander is a class game, and totally playable on the CD32!

[Digiman]

It makes a small difference, but nothing spectacular.

Also, when the actual game gets more complicated the amount of time spent on c2p conversion lets smaller and smaller, and so does the performance boost given by Akiko.

In short: Having akiko on existing A1200 systems would give no benefit whatsoever, except maybe in case of an 030 accelerator. If your system doesn't have an accelerator it is really too slow to run the game anyway. If your system does have an 040/060 accelerator it's as fast to use optimized c2p (they reach copyspeed) anyway.

You miss the point, big deal a 486 33mhz requiring game requires an 040 25mhz Amiga shocker.

The benchmarks show a 50% speed improvement. So if you wrote any game engine and it managed 13-15fps on A1200 sans Akiko you can make it run 22fps for free on Akiko. The issue is 95% of Amiga games had sloppy n00b coding.

Both A1200 and CD32 should have had a single SIMM slot to add fast ram AND Akiko.

040 50mhz card = £799 in 1992 so stop going off topic.

[Digiman]

Given the very simple way Akiko works (write chunky words to its registers and then read back/copy the planar converted data) it's no surprise the speed up is rather moderate. AFAIR there was some space left on the gate array that was to become Akiko and the developers tried to think up something useful. Well, they did, given the budget.

Something that would really have made a change:
- adding a c2p converter in front of Lisa's bus interface with on-the-fly conversion - no waste of bandwidth here
or better:
- adding a chunky mode to Lisa - was missing from AGA from the start

OR just scrap Amiga compatibility and make it all 8/16/24bit chunky pixel modes only (as compatibility is the whole reason AGA was a luke warm minor upgrade...2 years too late). Chunky AND planer doesn't mix and is hugely epensive....ie AAA chipset trainwreck.

[Digiman]

Most people that have graphics cards aren't using them on a 68020 so your comparison isn't valid. The speed up for my 040 on an RTG card over AGA was immediately obvious.

-edit-

Oh wait, you are referring to modern cards on other systems, not RTG versus AGA. Yeah, you have a point. I currently have a GTX260, hopefully I won't get any newer card that isn't at least 50% faster.

Think the point is you get something for nothing, in 1992 a SIMM slot for A1200 fast ram and Akiko would have helped sales against £999 386DX 25/33mhz PCs.

Commodore didn't go bankrupt because nobody wrote Doom style games for Retina or Picasso graphics card equipped 33mhz 040s you know

A1200 was not thought out properly, a SIMM slot costing 50 pence would have allowed users to easily double the speed of the new fashionable Doom style crap popping up everywhere and if Akiko was on the motherboard too thats 50% for Akiko and 100% for CPU speed increase for the price of a 512kb SIMM purchase compared to what we were stuck with. And luckily for us because Amiga games were so badly programmed most of that increase in speed is automatic.

A1200 had no Akiko option and bare FAST RAM cards alone were £125 with no memory included for A1200s and CD32 was an 'unexpandable toy' unless you spent another £300 on an SX32 type device. £650 for a 14mhz computer vs £999 for a 40mhz one with monitor and 16bit sound card from Win/Tel world.

Commercial suicide. Can you imagine Sega or Nintendo or Sony getting themselves in that situation? Exactly.

Sad thing is the A1400 (A1200 with CD drive and 28mhz 020 and 2mb Fast Ram in A3000 style 3 piece case design was nearly ready for 3rd quarter 94).

[bbond007]

@Cammy
Your downloaded archive contained corrupt files. Lha reported...

*** Error on file 'Midi_Instruments'  : I/O Error

I re-downloaded the archive but had the same error. It might be worth checking your archive.

DoomAttack with the timedemo (no sound) works but gave an error and no fps...

Error: timed 2134 gametics in 2420 realtics

ADoom with the timedemo (and sound) works and gives me an error but shows the fps...

Error: timed 2134 gametics in 1869 realtics ( 40.0 fps)

The closest "competitor" on the Doom benchmark list happens to be an Amiga with PPC604E-150 at 2x the clock speed and 4x the CPU cache as my lowly 68060 . The Natami 060 and fpga processors could be up to 2x as fast as me too.

I got the same error. I disabled the sound.

It seems to run really slow on my 1200 and I'd expect better from an 060.

anyway, how do you start the timedemo...

[matthey]

The issue is 95% of Amiga games had sloppy n00b coding.

I wouldn't say 95%. There were some very good Amiga programmers too.

Both A1200 and CD32 should have had a single SIMM slot to add fast ram AND Akiko.

The CD32 should have had 1 SIMM slot, IDE and PCMCIA. I would have traded those for Akiko any day. Better yet would have been Akiko plus SIMM, IDE and PCMCIA. Surely that would have only cost a couple of dollars.

It seems to run really slow on my 1200 and I'd expect better from an 060.

The 060 speed is reasonable for a port written in C. Yea, the 060 was better than the Pentium at integer but the game was optimized for the x86. I'm sure a little 060 assembler could speed things up. ADoom is very playable upscaled to 640x400 (~11 fps by timedemo) on my Amiga which looks MUCH nicer so what is the point? The actual game plays much faster than the timedemo for some reason. I would say I'm getting >20 fps at 640x400 judging by how Quake feels at 20 fps on my Amiga.

anyway, how do you start the timedemo...

To run the test yourself, use this command line: DoomAttack -forcedemo -timedemo demo3

[mongo]

A1200 was not thought out properly, a SIMM slot costing 50 pence would have allowed users to easily double the speed of the new fashionable Doom style crap popping up everywhere and if Akiko was on the motherboard too thats 50% for Akiko and 100% for CPU speed increase for the price of a 512kb SIMM purchase compared to what we were stuck with. And luckily for us because Amiga games were so badly programmed most of that increase in speed is automatic.

A SIMM slot doesn't do you any good without a RAM controller to go with it.

And there was no "fashionable Doom style crap popping up everywhere" because Doom came out a year after the A1200.

[bbond007]

it gets an error but says

2134 gametics in 15115 realtics

anyway, this is not the killer app I upgraded past my 030/40 for...

[matthey]

2134 gametics in 15115 realtics

That should be 5.4 to 5.5 fps based on Cammy's numbers assuming a linear result. I bet the game is playable though where 5.5 fps would not be. The actual game seems like it has twice the frame rate of the timedemo.

[DonutKing]

The formula for FPS is:
gametics / realtics * 35

So 2134 / 15115 * 35 = 4.94 FPS
(well, for the DOS version anyway. I assume the amiga version treats timedemos the same way)

A timedemo renders every frame in the demo and tells you how long it took (in realtics). Number of gametics will always stay the same for each demo file. During normal gameplay doom will skip frames to keep the speed up, this is why the timedemo is much slower than the actual game.

[bbond007]

That should be 5.4 to 5.5 fps based on Cammy's numbers assuming a linear result. I bet the game is playable though where 5.5 fps would not be. The actual game seems like it has twice the frame rate of the timedemo.

well, i think it runs better under shapeshifter.

seriously, should it not be faster on an 060?

[commodorejohn]

Well, if matthey is right and this is just a straight recompile from source, it's understandable that it wouldn't run all that great (though it depends on what compiler is used.) What I'm a little surprised at is that nobody's done a 68k-optimized version yet...

[matthey]

@DonutKing
Thanks. That sounds reasonable.

seriously, should it not be faster on an 060?

Are you saying you have a 68060 and you're only getting 5 fps? I'm getting 40fps with ADoom using 68060@75MHz. ADoom was fastest on my system using...

adoom -forcedemo -timedemo demo3 -cpu 68060

@commodorejohn
There are CPU optimized versions of part of the code but that probably just means that it was compiled for the 68060 which doesn't mean much. Assembler for the 060 by someone who knows what they are doing will usually result in a 50% speed increase from 060 compiled code I've seen. The c2p routines are probably assembler but I'm using a gfx board which skips this.

[bbond007]

Are you saying you have a 68060 and you're only getting 5 fps? I'm getting 40fps with ADoom using 68060@75MHz. ADoom was fastest on my system using...

yes. it runs that slow. I have a Bliz1260 50mhz  with 64MB ram.

[Ancalimon]

yes. it runs that slow. I have a Bliz1260 50mhz  with 64MB ram.

I had the same problem. It turned out I wasn't running the 060 executable.

[matthey]

yes. it runs that slow. I have a Bliz1260 50mhz  with 64MB ram.

There's something wrong with your setup. In the Doom benchmark page, there is an Amiga 1200 with 060@50MHz using AGA getting 24.6 fps and even a 1200 with 040@40MHz using AGA getting 13.4 fps. You should be at least 20fps. Here is my setup...

All 060 caches turned on and MAPROM off (for BlizKick) in accelerator menu (ESC)
AmigaOS 3.9 BB4
"BlizKick myROM QUIET" line in S:Startup-Sequence using my custom made 3.9 ROM
ThoR's MuLibs installed (http://aminet.net/util/libs/MMULib.lha)
"MuFastZero MOVESSP ON" line added to S:Startup-Sequence for above
CopyMem installed (http://aminet.net/util/boot/CopyMem.lha)

The most likely problems would be incorrectly installed 68040 and 68060 libraries and not turning on the caches. The 68040.library in Libs: should be tiny. Mine is 748 bytes. If yours is over 1k then that is your problem. Open a shell and type "CPU" . You should see "System: 68060 68882 (INST: Cache Burst) (DATA: Cache CopyBack)". If these are fine, then try removing programs from your WBStartup, S:User-Startup and S:Startup-Sequence that might be causing a slow down.

Edit: I installed the 060 executable for Doom Attack and it made a large difference. I now get 1945 realtics (38.4 fps) instead of 2420 realtics (30.9 fps). ADoom is still faster though. The Doom Attack manual does mention removing divsu.l and divsl.l instructions because he thought they didn't exist on the 68060 but they do (the 68060 manual is not clear in some places) and his compiler did not support the 060 at all. The executables probably do contain some assembler which does provide a speed increase. There is probably room for improvement and the source is on Aminet. Here is Doom Attack with CPU specific executables...

http://aminet.net/game/shoot/DoomAttack.lha