Before you read on, please note that this is simply an overview of the last few weeks or so of my recent Amithlon use. There's nothing particularly exciting in here, but surely there's no harm in sharing good amiga related experiences with y'all?
Anyway, it goes a little something like this:
As some of the regulars here may be aware Ive recently rebuilt an amithlon box and have been having a blast with it. Despite a few shortcomings OS3.x is still my favorite amiga system (Im one of those sadistic people who enjoys the almost d.i.y. nature of OS3.x and the thousands of choices a person has to handcraft thier OS). Given the speed amithlon provides, OS3.x is opened up to a plethora of new potential, and software types.
After spending a little time updating and modifying my OS3.9 setup Ive got it to a point that, functionality wise Im pretty content so have started actually using the system. As is often the case I typically test out the heavier software 1st, just to make sure Im content with my hardware choices.
EUAE worked nicely with ocs/ecs and aga. I could even play Breathless in 1x1 fullscreen (one of the heavier custom chipset only games). Xtreme Racing was silky smooth, and so on. Setup with E-UAELoad and a person can just install and launch custom hardware hitting software as normal.
FPSE (playstation1 emulator) also worked beautifully and at full speed with all games I tried.
PC-Task almost works very nicely, however being that amithlons 68k emulation and pc-tasks x86 emulation both use translation buffers and jit type emulation it alternates between full speed, pausing for a second or 2, then going turbo (to make up for the time where things pause). Quite a shame, as on the occasions it doesnt exhibit such behavior its blazingly fast (to a point that games like elder scrolls are too fast to be playable).
Quake1/2/NemacIV/Duke3d/etc. all run nicely, even at 1600x1200. NemacIV was interesting in that it needs to be played at higher resolutions or else things move much, much to fast (tapping forward as lightly as possible will send me flying down hallways). Duke3d for OS3.x is much slower than it needs to be (about 4x as slow as same game running on same hardware when using mac emulator and 68k mac version(on my a1200+'040 at least)), but I still get about 45fps at 1600x1200, which while playable is still MUCH slower than even Quake1 (about 75fps in 1600x1200), and still slower than Quake2(about 55 fps @1600x1200). Alien Breed3d2 moseys along at between 240 and 300fps according to the framerate counter when using the rtg patch.
Video however is a little problematic. 720p mp4's drop some frames using FFPlay. FroggerNG is much, much faster, but unfortunately a little unstable and doesnt play many newer video files (although still more than I expected given its age (even plays some video formats that werent around when it was developed (I guess they share enough similarities with some older codecs)). All in all still more than adequate for some casual viewing (if I want to watch something properly Ill watch it in the lounge on my TV).
Mame ran brilliantly. Ive created about a dozen custom screenmodes to match the resolutions of many mame games and other emulators, which for my tastes is better than using upscaling filters and whatnot. Ive not played a great deal of games, but Neo Geo games worked great (upto about 500% of normal speed when turning on the turbo mode). Apart from this I played powerdrift, outrun, tekken, MK3, and SF2:The Movie and all worked at full speed and full framerate.
STonX: Fantastic AtariST emulator, but waaaay too fast. Had to slow it down by a factor of more than 10. Little off topic, but this is the emulator to try for '040 and '060 owners. Hatari is great as well (effectively to the ST what uae is to the amiga), but too slow for "real" 68k machines.
Snes9X: Playing Donkey Kong Country and Fzero on OS3.x was for some reason quite novel. Works full speed, and while I cant say I was surprised by ths I was a little surprised by the stability and quality of the 68k port.
Payback: Great game. Ran very nicely at 1280x1024 (hadnt created a 1600x1200 mode when testing this). Was an interesting test too due to the warp3d rendering option. I had to drop back to 800x600 using wazp3d with eye candy enabled (mipmapping, texture filtering, anti aliasing, gl coloring, etc.), but it looks much nicer this way than at a higher resolution anyway.
Descent Freespace: Barely played it, but its super fast/smooth at 1600x1200. Definately a game I need to delve into properly one day.
ScummVM: While Novacoder's recent versions are a little faster than some of the older amiga ports Ive been using 10.2 (iirc) as it supports many more games. Broken Sword2 on 68k Amiga... yeah baby!
Seems everytime I start using amithlon again I forget just why I enjoyed it so much last time. For my tastes it really is the perfect combo of old and new. With this last upgrade of my amithlon box it's finally smoothed out those rough edges that still existed on my old athlon64 amithlon machine. I dont think Ive enjoyed anything amiga related as much since I got a "new" a1200 + accelerator 9 or 10 months ago
Is there anytthing else people can think of that might be interesting to test out on an OS3.x system with some decent cpu grunt? Also, what OS3.x enhancements would people recommend when hardware resources arent a big issue? Im currently just using the more typical stuff (mui/afa_os/afa_zune/magicmenu2/bb1+2).
Thanks in advance and thanks for listening
