Fastest 68k Amiga

[xaccrocheur]

Hi

Some months ago I received a command for a work, a SCALA presentation to display Dpaint Anims for friend's art project. With Octamed-made music & bleeps. I sketched a lot, then fired up my 4000 and started DPaint'ing, adpro'ing, and now it's looking&sounding good enough to be shown to my friends, and that was yesterday night. To summarize, they loved it. But they also added a lot to the storyboard, in fact we blew it up, keeping some sequences& modules, trashing most.

In the meantime I got a job. Don't worry, everything will make sense in a minute.

[color=ff0000]I want a new Amiga. [/color][/b]
No so much because the ones I already have (My Old 1Meg A500, a 8meg 1230/50 w/o FPU and a 24meg SCSI'd 4000d) are not doing the job, they do, but I'm very afraid about one of these machines failing on me, I mean a part that I could'nt replace, I see prices skyrocket on ebay, and the 68k line slowly but surely entering the "vintage" aisle... And really, I could use a little speed boost. I never, in my living life, even SAW a '060 Miggy run.
So I want a new Amiga. A fast one. I got money. Just give me the thing.

What I want is a fast A1200, and I'm considering a mediator, or any other PCI bridgeboard, to expand it. But.
# What good is this solution really, when you only have a 060 CPU to power it ?
# I understand that once you use a graphic card other than the AGA chipset, your choices of graphic apps are reduced, but to what exactly ? What apps can be used on such a machine to do 2D anim, like DPaint&Brilliance do ?
# Can the TV-Out that I know the Voodoo3 has (I had one AGP version on a PC) be used to output 16b color animations to a TV ?

Thank you for any info that you can give me. Oh, and Amigakit rules. Thank you very much, M.

[Piru]

WinUAE is the most obvious cost effective solution.

Faster than any 060 system available, you can use both AGA and RTG screen modes (huge resolutions if you need to), and can get TV out easily.

Just my .02 eur.

[leirbag28]

Question:

How did you get Octamed MEDs to play on SCALA?

 it only Plays MODS.

Would love to see your presentation, as I am a SCALA freak!


EDIT:

@Piru

Um....if I am not mistaken......the fastest Amiga WinUAE can emulate is a 68040, and even thats not as slick.

[xaccrocheur]

leirbag28 wrote:

Question:

How did you get Octamed MEDs to play on SCALA?

 it only Plays MODS.

Would love to see your presentation, as I am a SCALA freak!


EDIT:

@Piru

Um....if I am not mistaken......the fastest Amiga WinUAE can emulate is a 68040, and even thats not as slick.

Yes, but 'Med outputs MODs happily.
As for UAE, I'm not sure about what is said here. I was wondering, among other things, if there are users, here, using PCI bridgeboards *without* a PPC accel..?

In fact, I'm happy with what I have now, I mean the AGA chipset and it's 15Hz TV-Out. But the framerate can be improved, and maybe the number of colours ? I'd love to put real 16bits sound samples as well, but I'm really wondering how those PCI cards are "blending" in the Amiga environment ?

And leirbag28, well, when the Visual it's finished you'll see it, I promise. On TV. But maybe not prime time. :-D

[Piru]

@leirbag28

Um....if I am not mistaken......the fastest Amiga WinUAE can emulate is a 68040, and even thats not as slick.

You are mistaken. WinUAE might be limited to 68040 CPU in the emulation, but it easily runs circles around any real M68K, overclocked or not. It's like several hundred MHz 68040, not to mention the ultrafast hdd, fastmem and vmem access.

This was the case 3-4 years ago already, by now it's ever faster...

[cgutjahr]

@xaccrocheur:

In fact, I'm happy with what I have now, I mean the AGA chipset and it's 15Hz TV-Out. But the framerate can be improved, and maybe the number of colours ?

The problem with adding a graphics card is that the software you're currently using (Scala, DPaint, Brilliance) will not support it.

There are of course quite some gfx and multimedia packages that will run on a graphics card, but most of them are targetting a somewhat different audience - they're mostly intended to be used for manipulating (static) 24 bit images. I'm told that DPaint and Brilliance are still unmatched as far as creating animations is concerned.

A good DPaint clone is PPaint, which is now freeware and available here. It is limited to 256 colors, but it supports gfx cards. Everything else available for gfx card users is more or less a photoshop clone (I'm exaggerating here, but don't expect anything in the style of DPaint or Brilliance).

Same goes for Scala: There's now a replacement called Hollywood Designer, which is pretty powerful (but not yet as intuitive as Scala) - using a commercial plugin, it can even play Scala presentations (on gfx cards aswell). However, it is a completely different package, albeit with a similar concept. And it needs as much horsepower as you can get.

[Karlos]

leirbag28 wrote:

Um....if I am not mistaken......the fastest Amiga WinUAE can emulate is a 68040, and even thats not as slick.

JIT emulation of even the 68020/68881 combination on any half modern x86 simply murders *any* real 680x0 CPU in performance terms. Even my old K6-II 500MHz (and the old AMD systems were very badly implemented in terms of support chipsets etc) ran 680x0 code in UAE far faster than my real 68040 could ever conceive of.

[KThunder]

i think what gets confused with uae is speed of emulation compared to what is emulated. but what it really comes down to is that with any modern pc uae can emulate any 68k cpu many times faster than any real 68k.
many people (me) want real classic silicon to put out fingers on.

[Doppie1200]

Piru wrote:
@leirbag28
You are mistaken. WinUAE might be limited to 68040 CPU in the emulation, but it easily runs circles around any real M68K, overclocked or not. It's like several hundred MHz 68040, not to mention the ultrafast hdd, fastmem and vmem access.

This was the case 3-4 years ago already, by now it's ever faster...

68040 is not even a limitation in terms of instructions. Isn't that why an 040 and 060 is in need of some software aid to emulate missing 68000 opcodes.

Not being able to emulate the 060 is not an issue. The P4@2.6GHz machine will run circles around the real 060@50MHz.

Edit: thought I might as well add some on topic opinion.

Create a souped up towered A1200 only if you really like the hassle, don't care about the money and like the alternative software it can run.

Because other than that I think an amiga that is souped up like that is just too expensive for what it becomes and what you can do with it.

Think of the architecture: You toss overboard all that Amiga hardware is about and use an 060 or even a PPC to interface via PCI with a GFX card or even a soundcars or NIC.

The only thing amiga about that machine is probably the motherboard that is only in use for the keyboard interface and as PSU for the rest of the system.

Take it one step further then; Use a PC + UAE. Faster cheaper and probably 1% less amiga then the other config.

I just don't see the fun of it.

From my own experience; I have an 060@50 in my A1200. It is faster than the 030@50 I had before but not by that much.
Afterall it was just the desire to obtain the hardware. Now that I have it I realise I just run WHDLOAD on my system. No need for horsepower when vintage gaming.

Ask yourself what you are after and if it is worth the hassle.

[Piru]

Not being able to emulate the 060 is not an issue.

Except for demos/apps that explicitly check for 68060, even without actually using any 68060 specific features.

There's  Make060 for these, though.


PS. I am well aware that the emulated system is pretty much equally fast, regardless of the CPU type you choose.

[DamageX]

In the past I had run WinUAE on my AMD Sempron PC and the performance seemed to be about 3-5x as fast as my A2000 w/ 68030. After reading this thread I went and had another look and found out about the JIT option... it is true that UAE running on a cheap PC blows away any real 680x0.

Although I usually like to play around with real hardware more than an emulator, I would still say that UAE is a great alternative to the expensive "high-end" classic Amigas.

Karlos wrote:

leirbag28 wrote:

Um....if I am not mistaken......the fastest Amiga WinUAE can emulate is a 68040, and even thats not as slick.

JIT emulation of even the 68020/68881 combination on any half modern x86 simply murders *any* real 680x0 CPU in performance terms. Even my old K6-II 500MHz (and the old AMD systems were very badly implemented in terms of support chipsets etc) ran 680x0 code in UAE far faster than my real 68040 could ever conceive of.

Heh, even my old bag o {bleep}e 300Mhz K6 (Overclocked 266) runs 68k code faster than my 040 does. :-)

[B00tDisk]

Piru wrote:
@leirbag28

Um....if I am not mistaken......the fastest Amiga WinUAE can emulate is a 68040, and even thats not as slick.

You are mistaken. WinUAE might be limited to 68040 CPU in the emulation, but it easily runs circles around any real M68K, overclocked or not. It's like several hundred MHz 68040, not to mention the ultrafast hdd, fastmem and vmem access.

This was the case 3-4 years ago already, by now it's ever faster...

Indeed.  Sysinfo with WinUAE on my 2ghz P4 reports back that I've got a fourteen gigahertz 68040! :-D

[B00tDisk]

Piru wrote:
@leirbag28

Um....if I am not mistaken......the fastest Amiga WinUAE can emulate is a 68040, and even thats not as slick.

You are mistaken. WinUAE might be limited to 68040 CPU in the emulation, but it easily runs circles around any real M68K, overclocked or not. It's like several hundred MHz 68040, not to mention the ultrafast hdd, fastmem and vmem access.

This was the case 3-4 years ago already, by now it's ever faster...

Indeed.  Sysinfo with WinUAE on my 2ghz P4 reports back that I've got a fourteen gigahertz 68040! :-D

[KThunder]

timing istnt accurate under uae for sysinfo a 2ghz 32 bit cpu with software overhead obviously cant emulate anouther 32 bit cpu with additional software overhead at 14ghz.
trhe best thing to do is take an amiga and a pc side by side and perform a cpu intensive task like rendering a trace in povray. something that can be done in duae winuae windows and amiga native and compare those results.