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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: Imerion on August 29, 2004, 12:33:47 AM
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Hello again all! I just bought an A4000 with loads of goodies. It has a 040/40 Mhz processor and 12 mb ram.
The problem is this : When running in Workbench everything goes extremely fast. Feels like three times the speed of my old A1200 030/50 Mhz. However, when running games, my new machine feels slower. Not by much, but still, I expected twice the speed. Anyone who knows why this is? I have some programs running in the background like MCP and a couple of others. But I had some of them on my old machine to. Anyone who knows what might be the cause of this.
Thanks for any help!
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Which games specifically? 99% of games are tied to the custom chips and will run the same speed on everything from a 68000 to a 68060. Can't imagine why they would run slower.
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@ Imerion,
Oxypatcher?
Chris
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I mean games like Gloom, Breathless and Alien Breed 3D 2. Those should shureley run faster on a faster processor.
I am running DirOpus 5 in the background as well. Might be it...
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All of those games run through AGA. They should pick up the '040 though - do you have the correct '040 libs?
The more free ram the better - WHDLoad should archive your chip mem into fast while the game is running, but all those 3 will use the fast mem too. More is better, and on the accellerator too if possible (not sure if some things don't pick up the MB ram first, which will be slower than your extra A1200 memory).
EDIT: Try booting into breathless from floppy, under UAE from floppy it runs at max detail for me, but under UAE with WHDLoad it needs 2x2 pixels to be fast in 320x200!
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Oxypatcher? Hmm, haven't heard of it. Might be installed though. What is it?
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Check here :-) (http://www.youngmonkey.ca/nose/articles/NewTekniques_9902/ImprovingPerformance/)
It's commercial software BTW. Oh, and ADoom doesn't use a FPU so it might be worth trying that for speed (it's on Back2Roots under the HD section).
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These mathlib seem good. Ill try them. Also, I tried a demo called "Impossible" by the group "loonies". It ran quite slow from Wb 3, so I tried to boot with an old Wb 1.3 disk, but then It couldn't find my FPU at all. Perhaps that is the problem. Wb 3 won't simply find my 040 processor and instead uses the standard 020 one. I do not know if the 040 is standard in this model of the A4000 or if it is on a turbocard. If it is, I might need turbocard-drivers...
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Imerion wrote:
Wb 3 won't simply find my 040 processor and instead uses the standard 020 one. I do not know if the 040 is standard in this model of the A4000 or if it is on a turbocard. If it is, I might need turbocard-drivers...
The 68040 CPU is fitted on the A3640 processor-card,
wich is standard in the A4000(T). There's no standard
020 in the A4000(T). However, some A4000's where equiped
with 030 CPU's.
You also don't need "turbocard-drivers", only the 68040.library in LIBS:
(That is if you use an A3640 card, don't know about other
040 accelerators).
:-D
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Sounds like you have either a WarpEngine or a GVP GForce card. Make sure you use the installation software for each one, as each should come with it's own special 68040 libraries. Some accelerator cards also use software patches to bypass problems in the Amiga motherboard design. This is especially true in the A4000, which has a slow mb memory design. Without the proper libraries and patches for fast memory for instance, the 68040 will run not appreciably faster than a fast 68030 and maybe even slower if it uses the mb memory at normal speed.
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I am shure there is no graphics card in it. And I have the 040-library in the libs dir. What memory patches? Can they be found on aminet?
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The 68040 CPU is fitted on the A3640 processor-card,
wich is standard in the A4000(T). There's no standard
020 in the A4000(T). However, some A4000's where equiped
with 030 CPU's.
According to the bboah Commodore released a few 020 equipped A4000s.. and theres even a "020" jumper on the A4000 mainboard..
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Time to pop the case open and take an inventory before going any further I'd say :-)
If you're not too hot on ID'ing bits just take photos of the inside and I'm sure some of us annoraks will be able to help.
Also, once you know whats needed I'm sure someone can help you with the right system disks if you're missing them. If you got any with the machine let us know what they are, it might help (inheriting someone elses baby is always tough - sometimes it's easier to just start again in the long term!).
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rayt wrote:
According to the bboah Commodore released a few 020 equipped A4000s..
I never heard of A4000's equipped with 020's, and I'll
bet nobody's actually using one.
I think that's really sick... A4000 running on an 68020!
:lol: :pint:
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Ok, I ran a benchmark program to check stuff out. It is a 040 processor, however, it is running in 25 Mhz and not 40 as I previously thought. What do you think, is a 040/25 Mhz faster or slower than a 030/50 Mhz? If it aint, there is probably nothing wrong at all. The strange thing in that case is that Workbench works like 10 times faster. That might have to do with faster busboard, hd, mem and so on though...
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You need to check where the memory is , then. If you have an A3640 board, with memory on the motherboard, then it's not surprising it's sluggish in games. The '040 at 25MHz does have more power, but the slow memory (compared to an A1200 accellerator) will cripple it.
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A 040/25MHz is faster than a 030/50Mhz period. About twice as fast. Even with no local memory. Of course if you had local 32bit mem it would be even faster.
Again most games hit the hardware and do not seem to run faster/slower in relation to the CPU. Even on my 060/66MHz the games run almost normal speed. Though I sometimes have to turn off the cache but that still is faster than a 030. But some games seem to use the extra horsepower, like Gloom, Doom and Quake.
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Have you tried the games without all that
utility stuff running in the background?
Some of these programs really slowing things down.
:-)
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@Tj - I'd contest that point, in games an A3640 won't set yer pants on fire like an A1200 '040/25 card would.
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@holley
If you read what I said, local memory will speed it up, but it is not that much faster. (local memory is what a 1240 would have, or a blizzard 1260)
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I have read that there are speed issues with accessing the memory on your motherboard with the A4000. If you have a processor card with RAM on it would be faster, even if it was another 25mHz '040 CPU on that board.
I have an A4000D in a Power Tower case, with fully populated RAM on the motherboard and the stock CBM '040 processor board. Unfortunately, I don't have the cash for the Accelerators available at the Amiga stores online. They all seem to just have the PhaseV boards, ect. And yes, I do run into speed issues myself from time to time. My biggest problem is with running out of RAM though. (Another reason to try to find a processor board, even an older one as long as you can add RAM to it.)
One thing that gave me a bit of speed was adding a Gfx card since this took a lot of load off of the custom chips. I have a PicassoIV which has the built in Flicker-fixer/Scan-Doubler so I don't have to worry about having an older and smaller Amiga moniter hooked up to play the old games.
My System:
A4000D in Power Tower Case
AmigaOS3.9
PicassoIV
X-Surf II (For DSL connection)
A2091 with GuruROM (for my SCSI burner, Z-II RAM disabled on it)
Sony CDU 924S SCSI burner
56x IDE CD ROM
It's a nice system, but it has a lot of room for expansion and improvement.
4gb HD and a 2gb HD
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I took some pics from the inside of my A4000. Perhaps those can help :
(http://users.quickfox.org/~imeriontheesper/a4000_0.jpg)
(http://users.quickfox.org/~imeriontheesper/a4000_1.jpg)
(http://users.quickfox.org/~imeriontheesper/a4000_2.jpg)
Also, I have MCP running and it has two options which might have something to do with this. The first one, called processor (pretty self-explanatory :) ) has loads of options. Should the be in any special order to get maximum speed? Also there is an option called "Speed Ramsey" which supposedly speeds up ram. Should I use it?
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Looks like you got enough RAM-memory on that board.
What's it anyway? Some sort of SCSI-controller perhaps?
About MCP: Try playing games without MCP running, then
see what happens.
B.t.w.,
You should remove the battery, seems like it's leeking!
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Arrr, that be a SCSI hard card with Zorro2 memory (check here (http://www.amiga-hardware.com/gvpimpactii4000hc8.html)). Plus filled sockets on the MB would give a theoretical max of 24Mb.
The most importand bit is whatever is under the CDRom drive I'm afraid, though this machine would have been fitted with an A3640 from the factory.
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Ok, here are two pics of the Processor-board :
(http://users.quickfox.org/~imeriontheesper/a4000_3.jpg)
(http://users.quickfox.org/~imeriontheesper/a4000_4.jpg)
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Bingo, thats an A3640 (http://www.amiga-hardware.com/a3640.html) ... unfortunately anything more potent costs money these days, ho hum. One the plus side that SCSI hard card is quite a handy piece of of kit, an you've got a good chunk of memory.
BTW if you ever sell the A3640, that one will need a lower profile heatsink to fit an A3000.
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!!!WARNING!!!
If your battery is a NiCad remove it NOW! The Amiga 4000 is prone to RTC and SIMM damage with very little battery leakage!!! I had 2 so I know. The solder risist wasn't even tarnished and it looked fine, BUT the RTC was not working.
Remove the Battery now, it is not needed for the 4000 to work, just a date stamp for files.
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Oh boy, yeah, that too!
It's ok to cut the legs off it to remove it, and they can be replaced with a remote battery if having a current clock is important.
This reminds me, gotta do the A1200 memory card I just got from Cyberus too ...!
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Ok, so I should remove the battery. Is it just to cut of the connectors? And are you shure that nothing else than the clock needs the battery?
So, if I got everything right, that processor card isnt good because it has no ram on it, so the ram has to be used from somewhere else and that makes stuff slow? And there is no patch or something to go around this?
Sorry for beeing so noob-ish. But I guess this is the only way to learn.
One last question, if I want to add memory to that scsi expansion card, what type of mem should I use.
Is this ok? : http://www.tradera.com/auction/AMIGA___C64___spel/aid_7535664
Well, its in swedish, but look at the pic...
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AFAIK, the battery just runs the clock when you power down. You can either set the clock youself when your power up or if your Amiga is on the 'net you can use a program like FACTS to set the clock for you.
I have a battery in mine, but my board was supposedly refurbished by Software Hut a few years ago.
My experience with Zorro-II RAM came when I plugged in an 8MB SupraRAM card I had in my old A2000 into the A4000. Sure the memory showed up, but it really bogged my system down bad. It would be nice if I could add some extra RAM without taking such a huge speed hit.
What really made it stand out was watching how slow the buttons were being drawn in on iBrowse when I fired it up. While I need the RAM, it wasn't worth the price I was paying by adding it the way I did. For this reason, I have the RAM on my A2091 disabled. (It's fully populated with a whopping 2MB of RAM. LOL Pity I cannot take advantage of DMA transfers with the board.)
Your SCSI controller looks like it's fully populated with RAM anyway. One thing to keep in mind is that the GVP controllers usually required special GVP SIMMs.
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I have removed the battery. I really wont need a clock anyway. The board is fully populated, but its only a total of 12 mb, so I might get som bigger sims. Perhaps I can find som from GVP on an auction. I also have an empty slot on the mother-board. Can I add some mem there?
Also, I checked the settings in MCP. These are the processor settings I have for the moment :
An (X) after something means its currently turned on.
VBR to Fast-Memory (X)
Instruction Cache (X)
SpeedRamsey - Tried this, it crashed
SSP to Fast-Memory
Copyback (X)
Data Chache (X)
FastGary (X)
FastRom
Audio Filter
Can someone tell which should be checked/unchecked to get maximum speed. The help-file is not very useful in this area
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On your motherboard you can have 2Mb of chip ram (it's best to leave that be), and up to 16Mb in simms (it needs a set of 4!). Unfortunately not all simms the right size work (IIRC they're 30 pin ones).
I'm guessing yours shows up 8Mb on the SCSI card and 2Mb of chip, which would explain why everything feel sluggish in games!
The accellerator isn't ideal, but it's ok :-)
Those settings should result in good performance as long as you have enough Ram (8Mb counts as enough, unless any games work better with a full 8Mb available - that I don't know).
EDIT: sorry, you said 12Mb ... disable/remove the SCSI card ram and see how much shows up! - only the Fast mem matters for counting if you already have the full 2Mb of chip.
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HI
Nice A4000. We have a nice Warp Engine 4040 accelerator in stock with 64mb 32mb ram on board and a Fast SCSI 2 controller on board - 10/mbs! All that for only $250! We are located in NYC.
www.magneticsystemsnyc.com
We also have tons of other Amiga gear let me know if you need anything.
magnetic
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@alberonn
You don't have to disable any 16bit RAM in the 4000 if you have higher priority 32bit RAM! My 4000 has 2MB Chip, 16MB on the MB, 128MB on a DKB 3128 and 128MB on the GVP-m 4060 card! It runs the same with or without the slower RAMs. The way it works the system sets a priority to the RAM. I think Chip is like -2, 16bit RAM is -1, MB RAM is 0 and 32bit RAM on a CPU card is like 3 or something. What happends is the system always uses the higher priority RAM, then when all of that is exhausted, it uses the lower priority RAM until all RAM is used up. So unless I use up 128MB of RAM, my system will never suffer from the slower RAM.
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@magnetic
Isn't that a little steep for a 040 card in 2004? You can get a 060 card for ~$300 on eBay.
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I checked it, its 2 mb on the motherboard, and 12mb on the SCSI-card. And the reason its slow is because the SCSI card has slow acess to the memory. In another word, using only the 2 mb on the motherboard would be faster?
@TjLaZer
Isn't 300$ a little steep for a 060 when you can get a G3 for
500$ :)
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Holley wrote:
On your motherboard you can have 2Mb of chip ram (it's best to leave that be), and up to 16Mb in simms (it needs a set of 4!). Unfortunately not all simms the right size work (IIRC they're 30 pin ones).
They're 72 pin SIMMS on the mobo :-)
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The 3640 was the slowest/cheapest '040 board ever made in the history of the world according to the interview with Dave Haynie on this site: http://www.amiga.org/modules/sections/index.php?op=viewarticle&artid=15
I've had a few 4000 040/25's in the past, and I can say that for most operations it wasn't that noticably faster than my A1200's with 030/50's in em. (Except in certain functions.. it really did sorta depend on what you were doing.)
So how come I never hear people talking about Fblit when they are talking about performance improvement? That used to be one of my fave programs for getting my AGA Amigas to fly. (iBrowse especially flew and scrolled web pages in 256 colors nicely with Fblit.)
Regards,
Goji
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My bad :-) Can you remember which kinds of Simm work, Cyberus?
I think this is a case of the 2Mb on the MB running out, then the slower being used pretty quickly - it certainly explains why Workbench seems fast, but games slow!
If you can find a set of 16Mb for the MB then it'll only slow when you run out of fast memory (I think that made sense ...).
When I was talking about disabling the SCSI memory I was thinking to work out how much memory was needed, but you know already, so no worries.
TJ is in the enviable position of having memory to cobble dogs with, I've got 16Mb in my A3000 and now 8 in my A1200 :-)
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-8<---
What happends is the system always uses the higher priority RAM, then when all of that is exhausted, it uses the lower priority RAM until all RAM is used up. So unless I use up 128MB of RAM, my system will never suffer from the slower RAM.
-8<---
Well my problem is that I would be touching that 16 bit RAM as I am using up all of my RAM... :P
I burn though 16MB of Fast RAM easily, especially when I'm surfin' the 'net
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Ahh yes indeed. Having 272MB of FAST Ram on the Amiga is greeaat... lol I just like having it, I hardly ever use it. :P (I got this DKB 3128 for $25 on eBay in 2002)
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Fblit? I got a program called SpeedBlit, I think.
Are there any other programs that patches or in other ways speeds up the system?
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Alberonn - AWeb has been working ok for me with 16Mb of fastmem (though I've never really pushed it hard!).
TJ - no worries - TBH I havn't found the quantity bad, just the speed frustrating! Whenever I get another machine I just know I won't have a use for more than 256Mb, lol.
It's a shame all the nice big box accellerators are so flippin' expensive right now!
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It must be nice to have that much RAM on your system. Even with 16MB of Fast RAM, I'm usually left with under half of that when I boot up. Maybe I got too much stuff running on my system... :P
It does seem that OS 3.5+ did start to suck lotsa RAM since I remember having more RAM when I was running OS 3.1...
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I'm usually left with under half of that when I boot up
:-? Errr, there's something eating that up which shouldn't be! I just have 3.9 (with Amidock, Glowicons etc), CGX4 and MUI ... and very little else at startup! It's basic, and takes up very little memory. CGX helps as it makes use of the graphics card memory though.
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Check your HD buffers - and other drives, too. I'm using about 10 MB for buffers and caches...
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My system uses about 1 mb on boot. But I have quite a lot of programs starting. Like MCP, KingCon, NewIcons and similiar...
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@alberonn
Check out my image gallery for my screenshot.
Here is a direct link. I guess I had 237MB left... lol
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=501
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@ TjLaZeR:
That Workbench is stunning, mate. One of the best I've ever seen.
What screenmode is that, and waht GFX card are you using?
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@xray,
I am using 1024X768 and I use Picasso 96 on a Cybervision 64. It runs nice and fast especially at 66MHz.
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Let's see, 10 HD partitions, that could be partly responsible, I have Miami always running with my DSL connection, and several programs in my WBStartup:
WBStartup-disabled (dir)
AmiDock AmiDock.info
ASyncWB ASyncWB.info
BenchTrash Clock
Clock.info clock1.htm
clock2.htm DefIcons
DefIcons.info DPMSManager
DPMSManager.info Exchange
Exchange.info Facts
Facts.info FontPLPatch
FontPLPatch.info Hellas
Hellas.info KillClick2
KillClick2.info LeftyMouse
LeftyMouse.info MUIPopPatch
MUIPopPatch.info OmniScsiCtrl
OmniScsiCtrl.info RAWBInfo
rawbinfo.info setKEYandMENU.info
setKeyAndMenu.rexx StartMiami
StartMiami.info TelserMon
TelserMon.info WBStartup-disabled.info
My User-Startup has a buncha assigns, ect. And I'm running a PIV 800x600 16 bit screenmode with a full-color JPEG backdrop.
Yup, I think I probally have way too much drek runnin'... LOL
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More about memory....
I now have a similar setup to TJ:
A4KT
2mb chip
16mb mobo
128mb Cyberstorm MKII
128mb DKB 3128
As far as I can tell, my memory is in this priority order:
Cyberstorm 128 (priority 40), 16 mobo (priority 30), DKB 128 (priority 20) and lastly the chip 2mb (priority -10).
I know the Cyberstorm ram is the fastest here. Is the mobo ram faster than the DKB (assuming the same simms for arguments sake)??
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@ all
I sorted it out.
I found the address ranges with Mempri (by Barry McConnell)
and then ran Axel Dorfler's Memtest that told me the speed of the tested RAM according to start address:
Cyberstorm 128mb: 30.7 mb/s
mobo 16mb: 14.7 mb/s
DKB 128mb: 10.4 mb/s
2mb chip: 3.5 mb/s
@ TJ How do your results compare?
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Cyberstorm MKII 68060 @ 66MHz 128MB: 31.21MB/s
A4000 Motherboard 16MB with speed ramsey: 16.10MB/s
DKB 3128 128MB RAM Card ZIII: 10.78MB/s
2MB Chip RAM: 6.18MB/s
Woot!
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@Imerion:
By the looks of it, you have 4 MB (4 1MB 72-pin SIMMs) on the A4000 motherboard, and 8 MB (8 1MB 30-pin SIMMs) on the SCSI board. The SCSI board is maxed out, and these 8 MB are rather slow.
The A4000 motherboard supports a maximum 16 MB of fastram, in the form of four 4MB 72-pin SIMMs.
-Paul
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@ TJ
I take it your results are better because your O60 runs at 66mHZ while mine is currently 50mHz?