So much memory... what to do?

[slaapliedje]

So, I did some calculations;

I have an Amiga A4000D, decked out with the following hardware;

Mediator 4000Di
Radeon 256MB
Zorram 128MB
Spider 2
10/100 Ethernet
Indivision AGA
and soon to be Cyberstorm MK1 with 64mb of ram.

Now according to my calculations, that gives me 2mb of chip ram, and 16MB Fast, along with 113MB (from Radeon's first bank), 128MB (From Radeon's second bank, just need to add it in), 128MB from the Zorram card, and the soon to be 64mb from the Cyberstorm.

That's almost 450mb of Fast memory.  Now the question is.. what can one do with so much memory on an Amiga?

I'm still shocked that a computer that was released in 1992 can address this much.  It's too bad that Chip RAM is limited to 2MB.  Would be nice if that little jumper that says 2MB or 8MB actually did anything.  But that's all in hindsight of an architecture that otherwise had a lot of rather 'futuristic' notions at the time.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Only 15mb of that needs to go to RTG memory, the rest is counted as Fast Memory.  Right now I'm downloading TotalChaos off of Aminet and it says I have 238,386,832 other mem.  That's without adding that second bank of memory on the Radeon and as stated, I don't have the cyberstorm yet.

It's a nice benefit of the Mediator.  Since the Radeon doesn't support 3D at all on the Amiga, you may as well use that memory for something.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

I guess according to this; http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=736731&postcount=18

There are plenty of reasons to have 64mb of ram.  But I think I've gone just a tad over that...

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

No.
That is all dreadfully slow memory except for the 64MB of fastram on the accellerator card.

The 1985 Amiga architecture allows 4GB of memory address space and 2TB of HD size.  

[/q]Isn't all of it dreadfully slow compared to current memory?    Yeah, the whole 'Fast' ram is just how me and the system sees it, I suppose.  Chip and 'Fast'.  I could have sworn I had read that the Zorram at least was pretty close to the speeds of the CPU Slot memory, but I could be way off on that one.  Maybe I'll have to benchmark the different memory blocks.

[q]You can play my game I coded specifically for Amiga Lovers like urself.  It uses 32MB and multitasks.   Now you just hafta figure out what to multitask in the other 418MB
[/q]
I downloaded it last night!  Wow, did that take a long time to extract all the files.  Ended up falling asleep last night waiting for it, will be giving it a shot when I get home.

[q]You can just barely run 7zip.

You can use a really big RAM: disk.

You can edit high quality audio to your heart's content.

I recall the first thing I did when I expanded my Atari MegaSTe to 4mb of ram was put all of Ultima 6 into a RAM Disk and play it out of there.  It was AWESOME, near 0 load times.  I am sure I could do things like that, copy it to ram, play for a while, save out to disk.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Very easy: Help us at the Debian project to ressurrect the m68k port. We need people who provide build daemons which compile packages (see: http://unstable.buildd.net/index-m68k.html).

We need everyone with a fast Amiga who can help. The more buildds, the better. Please consider helping us, you can get into touch with us here: debian-68k@lists.debian.org.

Cheers,

Adrian

I've always wondered how fast Debian would run on my Amiga, but wouldn't providing build daemons using one of UAE's many ports be faster than real hardware?  Not to mention on Linux I could probably just leave it going all the time and provide multiple emulations running to compile it all.

Or I always thought the Buildds were running cross-platform compilations.  
But yeah, I certainly wouldn't mind helping out Debian, I absolutely love it, and use it everywhere except my two most used workstations (at work and at home, but running Arch Linux), and the only reason I don't use it there is for living on the bleeding edge.  I have always have the option to boot back into Debian if needed (at work and at home )

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

So, according to this post;

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=563681&postcount=15

The Zorram should be around 13.5mb/s.  The Mediator claims (from elbox's site) that it has a full bandwidth of 132MB/s (or 264MBs/ with the mythological SharkPPC board!).

Of course they also say that the A4000Di has 4 PCI slots, but I can't use my Radeon in slot 1 because the heatsink is too fat, so it touches the main Mediator board that has all the controller chips.

According to Elbox;

Code: [Select]

SDRAM/SGRAM of PCI gfx card as                      a DMA buffer
                    Mediator PCI 4000Di can use part of the graphic card memory                      for Amiga system needs. Thus, the entire system gains in performance                      as graphic card's SDRAM/SGRAM memory modules are about 10x                      faster than FastRAM memory in Amiga turbo cards. With very                      short access time in SDRAM/SGRAM, several PCI busmaster cards                      may use this memory simultaneously. The PCI cards may then                      rush at the data transfer rate of up to 132MB/s without any                      CPU load.[/SIZE][/FONT]
I couldn't quickly find info on how fast the motherboard "Fast" Ram is, but I have always known that the CPU card memory is the fastest (despite claims of the Radeon's speed).

For what it's worth TotalChaos, I don't think the Mediator is at fault for the Radeon's split 256MB, I think it's just the way the cards are created (possibly for Dual-Head, not sure though) but they are in different memory 'banks'.

You're probably right though, in that if I gave all 128mb of the first bank to Video RAM, it'd make the second bank of 128MB faster.  

I would gladly be rumored to or not rumored to be testing or not be testing an RTG version of the game!  

Right now I am running an A3640 board with the 040/25mhz on it.  I was extracting it with only it running, I believe I had quit AWEB and Genesis before I started it the extracting.  Haven't ran it yet, maybe I'll wait 'til the 060 is in my machine!

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Once the memory list of the OS is fragmented, quitting AWEB will not solve the problem.  It takes a reset.  Use the Frags cli command free from aminet to see how many fragments your memory has been thrashed into.

I also recommend to run TLSFmem which greatly fantastically reduces memory fragmentation problems.

Holy crap, right when you mentioned 'frags' I had a 20+ year flash back of using that, I'd completely forgotten about it!

I'll have to remember that, 'cause I was thinking the other night that with so many different banks of memory, something has to be getting confused somewhere.  Are there really any fixes for MUI to prevent memory fragmentation?  Like maybe using Zune?

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

The current recommended and easiest way is to use the filesystem tarball created by Thorsten Glaser. You hook up your Amiga harddive to a PC running Linux, create the additional Linux partitions and extract the filesystem tarball to the newly created Linux partition which will be your root partition.

Then you copy amiboot-5.6 (the beta version of 6.0 crashed for me) plus the kernel onto your AmigaOS partition and run amiboot like this:

amiboot -d -k //kernels/vmlinuz-3.2.0-4-amiga -r //cdrom/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram fb=false

Adrian

Would be nice for ClassicWB to add quick howto for multiboot, I know there is some sort of multiboot already set up for it, I just haven't gotten around to trying it out yet.

So what sort of Desktop Environments run on an Amiga w/Debian?

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Sounds about right.
That would be internal bandwidth from itself to itself.

When using the CPU to access the memory on a mediator card you will only get about 10MB/sec.  I can't remember the exact number but that is approx  what I get on my Mediator.  Of course mine is A1200.

[/q]If I recall correctly, the overall bus speed on the A4000 is faster than the A1200, right?  (I swear I remember reading it was more like 30mb/s, but maybe I'm pulling that out of some dark recess of my brain).

[q]Sure they are 10x faster from themself to themself.  From themself to yourself you will only get around 10MB/sec which is much much slower than the ram on any decent accellerator card.
[/q]

Ha, yeah that's why I said it's 'According to Elbox'.  Internally doesn't mean jack, when you are dependent on the bus speed between the PCI backplane and the CPU.  It's like I've always said about PCs, the real bandwidth bottleneck is now the hard drives.... SSDs are helping with that, but if we had 12GB/s SATA 4 or whatever, the systems would be way faster.  Then again if we had Amiga sized software, everything would be basically instant.  Instead we get fatter bandwidth, but games that are getting around 30GB in size!

On a side note, why settle for 1280x1024 and 16.7 million colors?  I run my desktop at 1920x1080 at 16.7 million colors  I even have a 2D-3D conversion style monitor.  Workbench looks pretty sick on it

slaapliedje

P.S.  Important safety tip, don't type a forum reply while having an Ale in front of you.  I had the lid on partially and tipped it over, and while I caught it quickly enough that it initially didn't spill, the jolt caused the carbonation to fizz up and overflow all over my table and drip onto my lap so it looked like I just wet myself.  Either that or I was thinking about the 68060 that's on the way.

[slaapliedje]

Would love to help out with the debian prodject but i need a step by step installation instruction on how to get things working.

Have a 3000T with an 060@ 72mhz and atm i have nothing to do with it

Whoa!  Get that bugger building some packages!    That's a nice beefy processor for it.  I'm going to see if I can't get Debian-m68k on a UAE install (or Aranym) and start helping with the builds.  I use Debian everywhere where I want a dependable operating system.

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

So according to this thread;

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=54411

My system is slightly faster than HammerD's, which is odd, considering I have the 68040@25mhz and he has a 68060@66.7mhz.  

For a proper comparison, this is with CPU Cache turned off with the boot menu, and I ran this in 1920x1080x32bit resolution on the Radeon.

Code: [Select]

10.System:Temp> showconfig
PROCESSOR:      CPU 68040/68040fpu/68040mmu
CUSTOM CHIPS:   AA PAL Alice (id=$0023), AA Lisa (id=$00F8)
VERS:   Kickstart version 45.57, Exec version 45.20, Disk version 45.4
RAM:    Node type $A, Attributes $505 (FAST), at $7000000-$7FFFFFF (16.0 meg)        
        Node type $A, Attributes $405 (FAST), at $70000000-$77FFFFFF (128.0 meg)
        Node type $A, Attributes $2005 (FAST), at $40C00000-$47EFFFFF (115.0 meg)
        Node type $A, Attributes $703 (CHIP), at $4000-$1FFFFF (~2.0 meg)
BOARDS: Board (Index Information Ltd):   Prod=2206/161($89E/$A1)
     (@$40000000, size 512meg, subsize same)
        Board (Index Information Ltd):   Prod=2206/33($89E/$21)
     (@$60000000, size 16meg, subsize same)
RAM     (unidentified):   Prod=3643/32($E3B/$20)
     (@$70000000, size 256meg, subsize autosized Mem)This is the ZorRam memory

Code: [Select]

10.System:Temp> bustest addr=71000000
BusSpeedTest 0.19 (mlelstv)   Buffer:     262144 Bytes, Alignment: 32768
========================================================================
memtype   addr       op         cycle     calib         bandwidth
user      $71000000  readw     247.6 ns   normal       8.1 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $71000000  readl     489.0 ns   normal       8.2 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $71000000  readm     491.0 ns   normal       8.1 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $71000000  writew    439.3 ns   normal       4.6 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $71000000  writel    878.3 ns   normal       4.6 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $71000000  writem    869.6 ns   normal       4.6 * 10^6 byte/sThis is the Radeon's memory (second bank?  I set the RadeonMem file to 128MB)

Code: [Select]

10.System:Temp> bustest addr=41c00000
BusSpeedTest 0.19 (mlelstv)   Buffer:     262144 Bytes, Alignment: 32768
========================================================================
memtype   addr       op         cycle     calib         bandwidth
user      $41C00000  readw     831.2 ns   normal       2.4 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $41C00000  readl     842.6 ns   normal       4.7 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $41C00000  readm     844.8 ns   normal       4.7 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $41C00000  writew    567.4 ns   normal       3.5 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $41C00000  writel    567.9 ns   normal       7.0 * 10^6 byte/s
user      $41C00000  writem    564.0 ns   normal       7.1 * 10^6 byte/s
slaapliedje

P.S. Sorry if you read this mess while I was trying to fix the formatting.  I tried to post it with the Amiga.org Proxy and it turned out to be a horrible mess.

[slaapliedje]

That sounds logical.  I can't recall where I read it at, or even the specifics, but someone I thought had said something about the cyberstorm mk2 being faster than the mk3?  (as I said, I could be getting that wrong, it could have been the mk1 was faster than the mk2).

So I did know that it really was dependent upon the particular model of accelerator.

Which is why something like the Natami or other newer full Amiga platforms would completely rock, updated memory bandwidth!

Should be getting the 68060 tomorrow.  Then I'll be sure to fire your game up and give it a play.  From what few screen shots I've seen of it, it looks awesome!

slaapliedje

[slaapliedje]

Agreed!  There was supposedly work done to do this at some point, since there is a jumper on the A4000D that says 2mb or 8mb, but as far as I know, it doesn't do anything.  There are a few other jumpers on the board that don't do anything as well.  Is the limitation in one of the custom chips?  I know WinUAE can use 8mb of chipram, so I'm guessing that it's not an Operating System limitation, or even a kickstart one.

slaapliedje

Edit:  It's Alice's fault!  http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/8mbchip.html

[slaapliedje]

So if this is Alice that limits the memory, and thinking about how the Indivision ECS works (or how I had read that it works) by basically replacing the ECS graphics chip with an FPGA equivalent, wouldn't it also be possible to do this with Alice, and replace it with the emulated Alice that WinUAE uses to enable 8mb of Chip RAM?  

Just a thought..

[slaapliedje]

Yes any new Amiga with faster fastram and faster chipram would make our old Amigas so much better!

[/q]Sure would make our old Amigas seem slower!  That goes off topic and I'm sure those conversations have been done to death.

[q]Its more about the gameplay than the gfx.  Just imagine a gfx card version of it that takes 16x as much memory.  1280x1024 is 4x bigger than 640x512 AGA and 32-bit pixels are 4x bigger than 8-bit AGA pixels = 16x the memory and 16x the bandwidth.  So it would look 16x as beautiful but have the exact same gameplay from AGA 1992 days.

I hope ur Radeon has 16x the bandwidth of AGA chipram.


I accidentally found a video to keep u company until u get ur 060:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nr0WMnCXTE

Awesome video!  Really does look like 'Total Chaos'.  Name is very appropriate.  Well, with '32bit' color, you'd have an 8-bit alpha channel, and could add some transparency effects that could (not sure how) apply to the gameplay.  Then again I guess with sprites you don't really need that. I'm thinking the biggest benefit would be larger maps!

Oddly, I bet the Radeon (in itself) probably does have 16x bandwidth of the chip ram.  Sadly, the Amiga won't take advantage of it, as we've already established.  (I found a reference to the AGP Radeon that says it has 6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth).  

But i agree, graphics definitely don't make the game.  Only type of games where graphics really matter (in my opinion anyhow) would be simulators, since that's kind of the point of them, to simulate realism.

slaapliedje