64 replies to this topic

[Pleng]

Does Beagle Board allow
If so, what AGA/020 Amiga speed do you get with Beagle clocked to 900Mhz?

OC'ing is not the way to go to achieve speed until you have tried better software approaches.

No, but it's a decent enough stop-gap until optimized software has been developed.

Edited by Pleng, 17 November 2008 - 10:34 AM.

[joshwaan2k]

Great stuff guys there were some really good AGA games back in the day

I predit Pandora will consume a look of lives this chrismas

Edited by joshwaan2k, 17 November 2008 - 11:37 AM.

[Laurent]

Looking at the success of uae4all when using Cyclone, an ARM Assembly 020 core would probably give the greatest boost, although it's going to have to be fairly accurate timingwise.

More specifically, it's a 68EC020 core we need, not a full 020. This may have a slight advantage of having only a 24bit address bus - like a standard 68000 - but there are still plenty of changes under the hood.

Time will tell - a 020 ASM core could also be useful for Mame games.

I have quickly profiled E-UAE running Battle Squadron on my x86 PC. The 68k emulation is far from being the most time consuming task; the *scheduling* of the various custom chips seems to be the bottleneck.

Also my experience is that asm cores tend to sacrifice so much for speed that accuracy becomes a real issue. Isn't it also the case for Cyclone?

PS - Of course this applies to my PC, I need to check on my Beagle

[silver]

I have quickly profiled E-UAE running Battle Squadron on my x86 PC. The 68k emulation is far from being the most time consuming task; the *scheduling* of the various custom chips seems to be the bottleneck.

Also my experience is that asm cores tend to sacrifice so much for speed that accuracy becomes a real issue. Isn't it also the case for Cyclone?

Interesting testing....

I had assumed that Cyclone was accurate enough as it was added to uae4all (and Cyclones webpage refers it's timing accuracy as a match for the Mame 68k core). However, it turns out it stilll has accuracy problems for Amiga emulation (notaz originally posted he would not use the Cyclone core in uae4all for accuracy reasons, so when it was added I assumed they were solved).

It also looks like even if we had a ASM 020 core, interfacing it to a UAE port is far from trivial - specifically because of what you have mentioned; the processer is completely tied up to the custom chips.

Your test suggests something along these lines, and also suggests that rather than a faster core we need general improvments to the E-UAE code....?

Anyway:

1) Some CVS version of E-UAE have been released in the past couple of months (13-8-08,15-8-08 and 20-8-08) which include bugfixes and integration of a more recent WinUAE core. The author says he is planning a stable release.

"Performance improvements:
* Some small custom chip and blitter tweaks merged from WinUAE 1.4.3.
* Some minor performance optimizations to blitter emulation, floppy
controller emulation and rendering code. (Thanks to Mustafa Tufan,
developer of PSP and GP2x ports of E-UAE, for a couple of these)."

2) Gnostic (GP2X developer mentioned above) posted a while back on these forums indicating 020/AGA emulation for pandora.

So it's possible that somone already familiar with the GP2x E-UAE is looking to bring it to the Pandora anyway.... I suspect all the devs are rather overloaded at the moment.


EDIT:

Incidentally another option for huge performance boost would be for someone to write a JIT compiler for ARM-cores. JIT is currently x86 only (and 030 and up only) but the 030 is a standard upgrade on a A1200..

Edited by silver, 19 November 2008 - 12:51 PM.

[Samurai_Crow]

There is a generic JIT compiler developed by Apple, Adobe, Google, and others called Low-Level Virtual Machine that is open-source and has an expermental ARM backend. Maybe writing a 68020 frontend for it might be useful for emulation purposes.

(Plus it would save me some work if somebody ported it to the Pandora since I'm planning on using its internal bitcode format in a compiler. )

Edited by Samurai_Crow, 20 November 2008 - 04:56 PM.

[wesbrown18]

There is a generic JIT compiler developed by Apple, Adobe, Google, and others called Low-Level Virtual Machine that is open-source and has an expermental ARM backend. Maybe writing a 68020 frontend for it might be useful for emulation purposes.

That's a really interesting idea. And Apple is pushing this technology rather heavily, using it in the iPhone. I'll have to investigate this, and see how hard it would be to write a 68000/68020 front end. But it's been observed that E-UAE spends most of its cycles on timing and scheduling, as well as running the custom chipsets.

[GnoStiC]

i can confirm that i'm working on amiga (p-uae (e-uae fork for pandora) includes all features/fixes of winuae 1.5.3) and c64 (vice) emulations for pandora.

for e-uae users;
my latest (public) e-uae included all features/fixes of winuae 1.5.1
http://rapidshare.co...205/uaecvs2.tgz

[silver]

i can confirm that i'm working on amiga (p-uae (e-uae fork for pandora) includes all features/fixes of winuae 1.5.3) and c64 (vice) emulations for pandora.

for e-uae users;
my latest (public) e-uae included all features/fixes of winuae 1.5.1
http://rapidshare.co...205/uaecvs2.tgz

Outstanding! Thanks for confirming that Gnostic....

[craigix]

I have quickly profiled E-UAE running Battle Squadron on my x86 PC. The 68k emulation is far from being the most time consuming task; the *scheduling* of the various custom chips seems to be the bottleneck.

Also my experience is that asm cores tend to sacrifice so much for speed that accuracy becomes a real issue. Isn't it also the case for Cyclone?

Interesting testing....

I had assumed that Cyclone was accurate enough as it was added to uae4all (and Cyclones webpage refers it's timing accuracy as a match for the Mame 68k core). However, it turns out it stilll has accuracy problems for Amiga emulation (notaz originally posted he would not use the Cyclone core in uae4all for accuracy reasons, so when it was added I assumed they were solved).

I'm quite sure all the incompatibility was solved long ago, does anyone know of anything in mame which does not run on the ASM core now? Same for the Amiga emulation, I'm pretty sure cyclone is now near bullet proof, or at least as good as the C core.

[Laurent]

I'm quite sure all the incompatibility was solved long ago, does anyone know of anything in mame which does not run on the ASM core now? Same for the Amiga emulation, I'm pretty sure cyclone is now near bullet proof, or at least as good as the C core.

It seems you're right if what Franxis wrote in the readme of MAME4ALL is true (and it probably is ) :

Cyclone: It is the M68000 ASM CPU core, faster than the C one. Enable it because it seems to have perfect compatibility.

Anyway that doesn't provide us with '020 emulation, and that's not the main bottleneck...

Edited by Laurent, 22 November 2008 - 06:48 PM.

[mfk]

As for now, I can confirm that we have an AGA Amiga emulation with outstanding compatibility. Thanks to Gnostic. Videos are coming soon.

[GnoStiC]

i've videos of pandora running fullspeed amiga emulation (68020, AGA, ks 3.1, 2mb chip, 2mb fast)

hopefully i'll upload them somewhere soon..

puae = e-uae 0.8.28 + winuae 1.5.3

[mali]

*grin*

[Laurent]

Nice

I hope it's running full speed with a good level of accuracy (Battle Squadron seems to require full core accuracy on E-UAE for instance) and with sound.

[GunPei2X]

As for now, I can confirm that we have an AGA Amiga emulation with outstanding compatibility. Thanks to Gnostic. Videos are coming soon.

My heart just stopped.