Demo duplicity...

[Karlos]

Hi all,

After browsing the news here, it occured to me just how long it's been since I watched a good amiga demo. We are talking three years!

So I headed off to the demoscene archive and grabbed a few PPC ones to see how things have come along.

On the whole they work fine except for the fact that the sound is utterly shagged :-(

They all seem to use AHI and dbplayer and I get the most god-awful choppy excuse for music whenever anything big starts to move on screen. Usually it sounds like a really long timestretch since the sound doesnt update properly...

I don't think its my AHI settings since plenty of other PPC stuff (inlcluding AmigaAmp) run fine.

I've tried tweaking and running from minimal startup and nothing helps. Anybody got any clues?

Here's the setup

Blizzard 040@25MHz, 603e@240MHz / BVision
64Mb 60ns RAM

OS3.5, boingbag 2 (er I think :-) ) / WarpOS 5 powerpc.library 16.1
ahi.device 5.29
paula.audio 4.20
dbplayer.library 2.0
CGX 4.2
Warp3D v4.2

I've systematically fiddled with most of AHI's / WarpOS's settings and nothing helps...:-(

[Damion]

Hi Karlos,

I have no clue as to what your sound problem
may be, but if you haven't already, check
out Grid2 and Zeon by Nature...awesome little
demos (and also the first Grid)...anyhow,
sorry to be off - topic here a bit, but these
are some well - done 68k demos (and both under
100k I think).

[Karlos]

They run OK on 040?

I remember running TBL's Rain on it a while back. They weren't kidding when they said 'run it on an 060 or you'll commit suicide'...

[Damion]

They should run much better than rain! Mostly
some cool polygon - type things with good
effects and well done (at times) music...I was
pretty stunned at what they had accomplished
with such small executables. They recommend
'oxypatcher'...I don't have that, I tried it
with 'cyberpatcher' (pretty much the same thing
I think?) but I didn't notice any difference.

[Hooligan_DCS]

I suggest to point the browser to www.irishq.dk and download Eurocharts. In the archive you'll also find a textversion of the charts... download the demos you have not seen before.

[carls]

Pseudo-off-topic, but still:
What, no good demos? How about "The Castle" by Loonies?

On topic:
I've had nothing but trouble with AHI. It's a major CPU hog and all programs I have that use it generally doesn't produce better sound quality - in a lot of cases I think it sounds worse than common 8-bit Paula. Perhaps your CPUs just doesn't cut it.

[Damion]

Somewhat off - topic rejoined:

@Carls

Just checked out "The Castle"...WOW! I am really
impressed by this one. The 'movement' is
probably the smoothest I've seen yet.

Also thanks for mentioning that site Hooligan...
I've spent the last several hours now watching
demos.

[Karlos]

Hi carls,

-edit-
I mean't I havent watched any demos for ages. They were always good, just some better than others :-)
-end edit-

I dunno about AHI. I mean it never seems to be such a hog on my system in the calibrated 14-bit modes. AmigaAmp gives nice output (muich clearer than 8-bit) and I don't see any slowdown due to AHI at all. Executive shows it uses about 10% CPU time when it's mixing around 8 channels at 44kHz /14-bit stereo++

The problem seems to be with dbplayer and stuff that uses it.

I thought executive may be messing round with stuff, but I have a second boot partition without any patches / hacks and the demos have the same problem. The visuals fly along unimpeeded but the sound is wrecked...:-(

[Karlos]

-D- wrote:
They should run much better than rain

Actually, the only problem with Rain was the intro sequence which takes ages. The rest of it wasn't too bad at all. I really like TBL's stuff, Captured Dreams was a favourite back in the day :-)

[elendil]

I remember running TBL's Rain on it a while back. They weren't kidding when they said 'run it on an 060 or you'll commit suicide'...

I'm glad you are still here :-)

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup (who has a 060

[Karlos]

Thanks mate! It was touch and go through the opening credits :lol:

[elendil]

I suppose that was funny, but I am danish, so I really have no clue what you were saying :-)

Sorry for killing the fun; that's who I am

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[Karlos]

Dont worry, most people don't understand my accent :-) :lol:

'Touch and go' is an expression meaning that something was close to happening (or close to not happening, depending on the context).
So, the into to Rain was so slow on my 040 I was close to commiting suicide, just like the readme for the demo suggested I would be for not running it on 060 ;-)

[elendil]

Aha!

Understood. Thank you for the clarification. Now I am one bit closer to surviving when I go to England / Scotland :-)

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[Karlos]

:-D