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

[mikrucio]

A BIG FAT

NOTHING!

the video ram on the ati is only rtg ram, only rtg games would use it anyway.
so you can knock that off the list.

but yeah nothing mate.

[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

[ChaosLord]

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.

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.  

 Now the question is.. what can one do with so much memory on an Amiga?

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

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.

[Lurch]

A BIG FAT

NOTHING!

the video ram on the ati is only rtg ram, only rtg games would use it anyway.
so you can knock that off the list.

but yeah nothing mate.

With the mediator the RAM from the Radeon can be used as fast RAM. :-)

[adrian82]

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

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

[Lurch]

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.

Sounds interesting, what's needed to get involved?

[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

[TCMSLP]

Sorry to hijack the thread - but I've found debian install instructions (http://www.debian.org/releases/slink/m68k/amiga/install.txt) and the current port packages (http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-m68k/main/).   The instructions are probably quite out of sync with the current builds.

Is there a dummies "click here to download" and "do this to start installer" guide?   I'm very familiar with Linux but it's the install (from AmigaOS) I'm unsure about.  The files listed in the FAQ no longer seem available from the ports tree.

[ChaosLord]

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

I didn't read the thread (or this msg) before I made my previous post.

I realize that you can add your gfx card memory into the system and it will go into the category known as "fast memory" but it won't actually be fast or anything.  It should be a tad under 10 MB/sec.  The ram on your cyberstorm should be at least 5x that speed.  Feel free to measure it with bustest from Aminet.

You really should not add any of the first bank as fastram.  Add it all as gfx card ram.

I may or may not be rumored or not rumored to be working or not working on a new or old version of Total Chaos for gfx cards.  I won't comment on silly rumors but I will say that if I ever did code a gfx card version of Total Chaos it would damn well for sure require a bare minimum of 128MB of gfx card ram and I would dearly love to use about 200MB but the silly RTG drivers won't work with 2 banks of gfx card RAM.  RTG drivers can only understand a single contiguous bank of RAM.

If I have 256MB of gfx card RAM to work with then I can intentionally not use some of that (so u can still multitask happily).  But I could use say 192MB and it would make things really convenient for coding, testing, speed, gfx, animation, gaming, fun, and stress reduction.

Trying to make a 1280x1024x32-bit (16.7 million colors + Alpha Channel) game that contains many thousands of intricate animations on a puny 16MB gfx card is absolutely no fun for me at all.

If u add the 128MB to the system as RTG gfx memory then all gfx internal to the gfx card can use that RAM at some amazing phenomenal speed like 256MB/sec or whatever (someone should write a testing proggy to figure it out because bustest cannot perform such a test).  What does the instruction manual or box claim is the bandwidth of the gfx card?

Please add 1 full bank of 128MB as RTG gfx card ram for all us poor starving gamecoders to make use of.  Thanxx0rz.

[ChaosLord]

I could have sworn I had read that the Zorram at least was pretty close to the speeds of the CPU Slot memory,

No way Jose

 but I could be way off on that one. Maybe I'll have to benchmark the different memory blocks.

Yes u should do that.  I would guess the Zorram should clock in around 12 MB/sec.  Amkit didn't post any bustest results on its website so that means the ram is really slow.  They always post bustest results for fast products.

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.

What cpu are u using right now?  An 030 is really really really slow with almost no L1 Cache.

Also there is a "trap" that ppl fall into.  They use Ibrowse and/or AmIRC and/or WookieChat and/or other fancy MUI software that totally thrashes the memory into many thousands of fragments.  This causes the computer to become very very slow.  At this exact point in time they suddenly decide it would be a good idea to uncompress one of the largest Amiga games ever made. :laugh1: :rofl:

Please Dear God, please, reset your Amiga before you attempt to run the game the first time. :biglaugh: Or it could takes hours to decompress all the losslessly compressed audio in the game.  (This only happens the first run, after that it becomes just another regular game.)

A 50Mhz 060 will also decrunch the audio around 10x to 20x faster than a 50Mhz 030 because an 060 performs floating point math massively faster than the antique 030.  There are many factors that affect the speed, such as the speed of your HD controller, I hope you are using IDEfix97?

I wrote the game specifically for the 060.  But I am not a member of the Nazi party so I allow 020 users to play my games.  Just don't expect certain things to be speedy on an 020.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

if I ever did code a gfx card version of Total Chaos it would damn well for sure require a bare minimum of 128MB of gfx card ram

I'm guessing that will limit you only to Amiga users who have Mediator/Radeon configs, then, and eliminate any Amiga users with graphics cards like Cybervision, Picasso, etc.?  Oh well, it's your game!  

[ChaosLord]

I'm guessing that will limit you only to Amiga users who have Mediator/Radeon configs, then, and eliminate any Amiga users with graphics cards like Cybervision, Picasso, etc.?  Oh well, it's your game!  

Correct

Picasso is too lame to ever be interesting.  I could maybe possibly make a 256 color version of the game for Picasso but it would definitely be worse, lower resolution and slower than the AGA version so I don't see the point.  I could force a Picasso version to use the same hires gfx as the AGA version but then everyone would have to create a custom screenmode, which of course they won't do so the game wouldn't work.  Then there is the fact that sprites don't work on gfx cards so the AGA version will be much better.  Then there is the part about it being much slower so the AGA version would be much better.  And all the parent/child screens BREAK on all gfx cards so the AGA version is better.  And the perfectly smooooooth 50fps AmigaOS autoscroll full screen scrolling is broken on gfx cards so the AGA version is better.  argh!

In order for gfx cards to be better than AGA they need 16.7 million colors and 1280x1024 resolution.  Once you do that then you need giant amount of memory to hold all the gfx for the animations.  Like, say 128MB minimum.

Luckily Elbox has provided us with a gfx solution that has finally achieved actual real bonafide advantages over AGA.