FPGA/Vampire vs WinUAE

[Aegis]

I found some AIBB benchmarks for the Vampire and for the heck of it ran a few comparative tests in WinUAE - on an i7 with caches on in AIBB (v. important for JIT) WinUAE came out 5-7 times faster than the Vampire - with caches off JIT is actually slower.

Testing WinUAE with JIT disabled shows pretty comparable speeds so if you have a fast PC and you're curious to see how well a Vampire might perform for you just turn off JIT and run WinUAE at 'fastest possible'

[Lemaru]

Thanks chaps. Some interesting comments made, much appreciated! Will have me a play with WinUAE once I found my OS3.9 disc

Ta

[kolla]

Keyboard, to name one (my fingers are hard-coded to the Amiga keyboard, sorry, and the one extra key with the backslash near backspace), usability of the two-window solution on a shared desktop, shared mouse. I would have expected that performance problems should probably be resolved these days with more capable hardware, though strangly enough, the P96 emulation still crawls for bizarre reasons on my i5 desktop after startup.

For the keyboard issue, that can be solved several ways:
* keyrah2
* catweasel
* arduino (http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=139358.0)

But I agree, the grooviest would be brand new real Amiga keyboards, also in USB and PS/2 variants. And that may happen very soon (Amiga time line relative.)

As for your UAE P96 issues, I am tempted to say that it must be a PEBKAC thing. Do you have numbers? Have you tried with FS-UAE?

[kolla]

Vampire2 for A600 lacks many "wanted" features. It would have been awesome if there was a USB host controller (like there is on MIST), that together with a more open approach to what goes on with the FPGA, for example could boost development of much faster networking options than what using ancient PCMCIA cards does. And high quality sound. And what have you.

[wawrzon]

@thor

Keyboard, to name one (my fingers are hard-coded to the Amiga keyboard

btw, just noticed that lame excuse;)
so, how do you actually code at work? plugging in your own olde a2000 tooth everywhere?

[kolla]

so, how do you actually code at work? plugging in your own olde a2000 tooth everywhere?

Maybe you should not ask how, but rather how fast?

For what it's worth, for many years I had A2000 keyboard on my workstations at work, using first catweasel3 and 4. Then I moved to DEC vt220/320 keyboard for a while as PCI became rarity. Ironically, now I use ThinkPad keyboard with a Mac.

[guest11527]

so, how do you actually code at work?

 > ls -l /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/de-thor

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 27425 Sep 25  2014 /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/de-thor  

No, AltGr-7 does not generate a backspace in FS-UAE either.

[guest11527]

As for your UAE P96 issues, I am tempted to say that it must be a PEBKAC thing. Do you have numbers?

3 27 6 95 63

Should be enough numbers for today. Now what?

Have you tried with FS-UAE?

Yes.

[wawrzon]

Maybe you should not ask how, but rather how fast?

im really amazed to discover that typing is a limiting factor when coding;) pity you guys dont code on aros, i must admit, that as it snands currently, i spend most time mindlessly glaring at the code, which eventually result in few lines of a fix. or not. takes ages:/

[wawrzon]

@Thomas Richter

what concerns fs-use, you can enable jit somewhere, which should leave you with a rather fast emulation, but i have mentioned it already, and i dont want to talk you out of using your a2k. on the other hand, when underway, an emulation comes in handy, when you want to contribute something on a quicker schedule.

[VingtTrois]

Playing 32CH module with DigiBooster 3 1 + Amiga 600 + Vampire v2b
[youtube]mVG1eB2M_2o[/youtube]

[kolla]

im really amazed to discover that typing is a limiting factor when coding;)

It can be, but typically isn't

pity you guys dont code on aros, i must admit, that as it snands currently, i spend most time mindlessly glaring at the code, which eventually result in few lines of a fix. or not. takes ages:/

Definitely. And finding out why bits and pieces builds on one system, but not the other, working around things that are not as much related to the code itself, but rather the environment and toolchain

[guest11527]

@Thomas Richter

what concerns fs-use, you can enable jit somewhere, which should leave you with a rather fast emulation, but i have mentioned it already, and i dont want to talk you out of using your a2k. on the other hand, when underway, an emulation comes in handy, when you want to contribute something on a quicker schedule.

It's a debian 8.3 64bit here, the jitter is not available. Concenring "not to code outside of my A2k" - that's not quite true. I'm just looking for better solutions, and I'm really working on better solutions and contributing to them.

I believe I posted this before, but I've invested quite some work into "vamos" and that *almost* works now as I'd like it to work.

The problem is not the emulation part. The problem is really the handling. I need an environment where I can switch quickly between the emulation and the native environment, an environment that I can script and that allows automated processing. The former for compilation and assembly, and the latter for all the software management around. I cannot conveniently do that with UAE (two different keymaps, mouse capture... this all breaks the "flow" if you get what I want to say, no scriptability, does not work over ssh...), but I can do that with vamos. I need an enviroment for development, not for gaming, and that's quite a different requirement.

"vamos" still has a couple of bugs unfortunately, but I really got a lot closer by spending my entire Christmas vacation on it. I've now a native Amiga shell, can write commands in there and *most* builds work. Unfortunately, AmigaOs does not yet build, but my vacation was over before I had the chance to find out more.

[wawrzon]

@thor
i dont know the state of affairs what concerns 64bit jit very well, because i dont need it, but i was under impression it was underway. other than that, i dont know vamos, is that an environment to run 68k amiga binaries on *ix? but good that you have found your way around.

[guest11527]

other than that, i dont know vamos, is that an environment to run 68k amiga binaries on *ix?

Yes, it is. However, unlike UAE which runs the native AmigaOs functions in kickstart, vamos comes with a python (yes really) emulation of a (rather small) subset of the dos, exec and utility library which is large enough for most compilers, assemblers and linkers.

The support is complete enough to allow the (emulated) execution of the (native) Shell-Seg you need to take from your (native) Amiga. Currently, you need the V45 shell for that because I was too lazy to emulate the pre-V45 BCPL GlobVec loader in dos the older shell versions depend upon.

[wawrzon]

btw, thomas, you have a pm.