whdload vs. WinUAE for classic Amiga Games

[Roondar]

What I've noted most in the WinUAE vs Real Amiga comparisoms I did was that the Real Thing (TM) does scroll much smoother.

An Amiga connected to a Amiga monitor or TV scrolls in sync as it should. Somehow WinUAE never manages that*. I didn't actually think about this until quite recently when I noticed how incredibly smooth Shadow of the Beast ran on my A600.

*) That includes when I run NTSC software on a 60Hz screen with Vertical Sync and no lost frames according to WinUAE.

Then I started testing (with a variety of WinUAE settings and yes, on a fast PC with a good GFX card) and found that pretty much all of the smooth scrolling games out there perform better on a real Amiga in that department.

The other thing is that a real digital joystick outperforms a PC joypad/joystick every time for use with an Amiga game. (Mice are a different story offcourse)

Lastly, using a small(ish) TV ironically gives you a 'better' picture than using a high end monitor. (This is offcourse due to the low resolution of the Amiga display which will end up looking more blocky on a monitor than on a small TV)

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)

[Roondar]

rare_j wrote:
Two reasons why you might choose WinUAE or WinUAEX over the real thing:

1) Confugurable controls. You can set your joypad up so you've got 1 button as turbofire, one button as regular fire, and one button as button2. You can even have a button to jump if you like. Try that on a real Amiga.

2) Savestates. Fancy finishing TurricanII in one sitting?

Back in the day there where plenty of joysticks that had configurable autofire and multiple buttons. I'll agree that finding one that lets you map 'up' to a seperate button will be tough, but then again the digital joystick is inherently a better fit for most Amiga games then a joypad or analog joystick will be.

The savestates thing is more interesting. For action games it can be handy (but there is a caveat*) but RPGs/Puzzles/etc usually had savegame support.

*) Most arcade games have a runtime of about 20-30 minutes, tops if played 'properly'. With savestates you cannot lose so you'll reach the end of your games much sooner. Takes away some of the challenge  ;-)

Not too mention that Turrican II is not exactly a game that takes hours to finish  :lol:

[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:

[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  ;-)

[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!

[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.

[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)