How can UAE be made to run at a decent speed on Linux?

[james666]

I started playing with Amiga emulation about 6 years ago when I installed WinUAE 8.8 on a 400 Mhz Pentium II Celeron system running Windows 98.  There were a couple of programs that didn't run and a couple more with minor sound glitches, but overall  the emulation was damn-near flawless.  On full-screen mode it was easy to entertain the fantasy that I had me a real Amiga with a hefty processor upgrade, flixer-fixer and proper monitor.  As far as I'm concerned WinUAE reached its apogee with version 8.8.  Subsequent versions seemed to get slower, glitchier and less stable, JIT or no JIT.

Now I'm a few years older and more paranoid, and I prefer to use Linux (Suse 9.2) as my primary operating system.  The only problem arises when I want to get my Amiga fix, because UAE on Linux runs like a sloth on downers.  Sound is glitchy and scrolling reminds one of an Atari ST on a bad day.  The comparison with WinUAE 8.8 under XP on the same machine or under Win98 on an earlier generation of hardware is painful.  I've tried E-UAE 0.8.28, compiled it with SDL but without JIT or cycle exact emulation and was disappointed.  Then I moved on to UAE-0.8.25, which runs a little smoother, but not much.  Finally I tried UAE-0.8.8, which is the best of the lot so far despite some difficulties persuading it to compile.  It runs a couple of games at full frame rate but still mostly sucks.  What's going on here?  The underlying code is mostly the same between Windows and Unix versions isn't it?  And I don't have any problems running full screen DVDs, which I would have thought would make greater demands
on my video hardware than a 320x256x32 Amiga display.  Has anyone else had more luck?

[james666]

Failure wrote:

If I read your post correctly, you are not using JIT when you are in Linux.  Why not?  I've been very happy with the latest E-UAE using JIT.  It used to crash for me on earlier releases but it seems fine now, as well as very fast.  I don't use WinUAE though so I don't really have a good comparison there.

I gave JIT another try on E-UAE.  I don't see any difference in the graphics and sound emulation speed of 2D games.  It's still a lot slower than UAE 0.8.8.  I guess I just need a faster PC.

[james666]

amigadave wrote:
@james666,  you aren't still running on a 400mHz Celeron are you?  I suggest at least 800mHz PIII or faster.

No, I now have a 1.4Ghz P4.  It is certainly fast enough to run UAE, but so far only under Windows XP.  WinUAE 0.8.8 on the 400Mhz Celeron was also plenty fast enough.  The conclusion I draw is that the Direct X routines in Windows are a lot more efficient than their Linux equivalents.  Pity about the security...