Frontier Elite 2, speed comparison

[Whitesnake]

I was wondering if anyone has tried this game on a A500+/A600 and A1200 too see if there is any Frame Per Second increase.
It might be the case that the game speed is hardcoded but if anyone has tried this please tell me.
 :-)

[StevenJGore]

There is definitely a speed increase between running Frontier on an A1200 and an A500. Similarly, there will be a speed increase between running Frontier on an unexpanded A1200 and an A1200 with, for example, a Blizzard 1230IV accelerator card. It's still not perfectly smooth, however, IMHO I don't think the Frontier code is particularly optimised!

Steve.

[PMC]

Yes I have.  I've tried Frontier on an A500, vanilla A1200, A1200 with Apollo 1240/25Mhz and Apollo 1240/40Mhz.

The increase in frame rate is quite substantial in each case.  Obviously the 40Mhz '040 was the smoothest, but you will notice a significant increase in frame rate by increasing processing power.  There are options in Frontier to alter the detail level to suit faster CPUs.  

[PMC]

StevenJGore wrote:
There is definitely a speed increase between running Frontier on an A1200 and an A500. Similarly, there will be a speed increase between running Frontier on an unexpanded A1200 and an A1200 with, for example, a Blizzard 1230IV accelerator card. It's still not perfectly smooth, however, IMHO I don't think the Frontier code is particularly optimised!

Steve.

AFAIK Frontier was written entirely in assembler and was one of the last games coded in this fashion.  It was coded for 68000 specific machines (eg Atari ST & Amiga) and both versions are pretty similar visually, but I don't think there's any optimisation specifically for higher end CPUs. Of course, the frame rate is faster but I don't think there's any specific code to take advantage of the extra features '030/40/60 processors - or indeed MMU / FPU modules.

If the source code is eventually released, some enterprising coder might like to create 040/060/PPC versions of the game engine and perhaps an RTG version?  It would make an interesting comparison with Amiga native chipset versions.

[whabang]

According to my own experience, there is a noticable dependency on memory speed aswell as CPU power.
On my old accelerator, I could change the memory speed.
Using 60ns RAM was clearly faster than using 80ns (I think it was). I also tried disabling the accelerator's RAM and used RAM in the PCMCIA-slow. This was slower than running with chipmem only! :-)

I managed to get 30ish FPS when using a 40 MHz 030, 60ns RAM, and medium details. Made the game a joy to play.
Needless to say, the game runs at ancredible speeds under UAE. :-D

[Daedalus]

Well, I'd imagine there's quite a lot of optimisation gone into it, given the amount of physics and 3d work that goes on, even at minimum detail on an A500. It runs a treat on an 060/66, but the fact that there's no way of upping the resolution for nice, "modern" Amigas makes it look bloody horrible on my monitor  :-( So now I play X-2: The Threat on my PC. Framerate's quite similar, with an XP2000+ and Radeon7200, so ou can imagine the detail level in that  :-D  :-D

[StevenJGore]

For the "ultimate" Frontier experience on the Amiga, try running the CD32 version on an accelerated CD32 or A1200. The CD32 version of Frontier was the most recent Amiga version, and the following quote is taken from a review:

The original (floppy) Frontier was compatible with any Amiga with 1 meg of RAM. Various problems and bugs emerged in the wake of the original release, and several revised versions slipped quietly onto the market prior to the launch of the CD32 version. Clearly then the CD32 Frontier executable benefits from all of the revisions, making it the definitive version...

There are a few differences to the basic version. The manual copy protection was not considered necessary and removed, which is in my opinion a good thing. There is one extra item of equipment, a navigational aid which when fitted (strangely taking up naff all cargo space) will let you view and select the nearest spaceport in the system you arrive in without all that zooming around. When landing at outdoor starports you might notice a few extra things like powerlines, and it could just be me but I'd swear that space is a more realistic (darker) blue. Apart from some concessions enabling you to use the joypad to enter your name (CD32 = no keyboard, remember!?) thats it. Oh, and it came in a bigger box...

Unfortunately though, the CD32 version falls short of including texture mapping!

Steve.

[blobrana]

Yea ,
i guess that it was the fastest...
Thought i have tried it on a WinUae set up, playable but not as fast as an amiga 600...

Anybody visited the Pleiades star cluster?

 :-)

[SamuraiCrow]

Unfortunately though, the CD32 version falls short of including texture mapping!

The Amiga graphics acceleration chips don't natively support texture mapping.  The only way to get texture mapping to run chunky to planar conversion (which is accomplished by the AKIKO chip on CD32) or to get a graphics card.  :-(

[Whitesnake]

While we are on the topic of Elite what happened to that company that was porting Elite 3: First Encounters to the Amiga.

[StevenJGore]

The only way to get texture mapping to run chunky to planar conversion (which is accomplished by the AKIKO chip on CD32) or to get a graphics card.

That was my point! The CD32 version could have done texture mapping using the CD32's Akiko chip, but it didn't! :-)

[Khephren]

The PC didn't actively support texture mapping either. 'native' generally means in hardware-it did not get 3Dtexture mapping till '95. The things it had in it's favour were speed of CPU and chunky modes. Braben and co never thought about writing a chunky to planar routine to allow texture mapping on the Amiga/ST, I think it was because it was all a bit rushed, certainly not because they didn't have the skill. As for the CD32 port, I guess they just got lazy and wanted to do a straight port. I remember all the Miggy magazines showing texture mapped ships, shame they did not tell us it was'nt our version!

[DegeRandolf]

Any chance of Elite2 working on the A1?

[bloodline]

DegeRandolf wrote:
Any chance of Elite2 working on the A1?

Sure! just download UAE :-)

[PMC]

Whitesnake wrote:
While we are on the topic of Elite what happened to that company that was porting Elite 3: First Encounters to the Amiga.

Pass on that.

I heard some discussion that David Braben was going to release the Frontier / FFE source code to the community, which would make an interesting project.  I'd love to see a prettied up version of Frontier that supports RTG being ported to 68k / PPC.