Hardware influencing emulation?

[Drake1009]

I just got an upgrade for my PC. This solved a darn lot of issues I had before among these the problem that the extra ghz of speed seem to make winUAE actually run at a decent speed.

Then I noticed something strange. I only changed my motherboard, processor and harddisk, yet now there are some Amiga games which I know ran earlier which refuse to run.

To test the speed I could run AGA games with now I first tried Soccer kid AGA to see if it would run. According to my notes from last time it should run under a standard A1200 like setup and I don't remember having any problems running it last time. yet this time it never loaded anything resembling the intro or the menu. I tried around a couple of other games which also didn't like working. I remember from the one time I played Zoom on a compilation disk that it was a fairly funny game so when it was posted in the zone I downloaded and tried the versions with a couple of different A500 setups in both Winfellow and WinUAE, but I wasn't able to get it to work. Due to the lack of responses I gathered other people could run it without too much trouble.

Could there be anything I could do to make it work right again other than put my old mobo and processor back in the computer? Any JIT settings which might require alteration (The config file I had kept suddently started reporting errors in the JIT config though nothing was changed config wise).

[oldpx]

Have you re-installed windows? You may need a clean install. Maybe your graphics card doesn't like the new mainboard or you may just need new drivers.

[Ian]

Yeap, I just upgraded from a Jetway motherboard to an Abit motherboard with the same chipset (Via266a) and had to reinstall Windows to notice any difference, which was suprisingly big.

I think reinstalling Windows is a must after every motherboard change. I highly recommend it;)

[Drake1009]

I reinstalled windows on the new harddisk so it's a completely clean windows install. And my Geforce is installed with the newest drivers which work (the detonator xp ones messes up my screen badly). The Geforce have run Amiga emulation before though a bit slow. It still runs amiga emulation but now at a good speed, but there are some games which refuse to run.

[oldpx]

Detonator drivers have problems of their own. I'm using version 23.xx and I have to detect 16-bit pixel format each time I use WinUAE with my 3.1 Workbench configuration. Oddly, I don't have to do that with old games. If detonators cause refresh rate problems, use nvidia refresh rate fix (http://www.planetquake.com/ztn/) . Manufacturer's own driver is usually a lot slower and incompatible than detonators, at least this is the case with my drivers. Also some of the detonators out there are beta versions. The stable one is only on nvidia's website but it's not much stable than the betas anyway.

[Drake1009]

Somehow I found browsing Nvidias homepage for older Detonator drivers quite hard. Or maybe I was just lazy. At any rate, the fix is for XP/2000 machines while the drivers I downloaded were for 98/ME (I still run 98). I tried a final release of Detonator some time ago and got slowed down about 20% compared to the drivers on the disk I got with my graphics card (30% compared to the drivers I downloaded then and still use since Asus made no new drivers, hey could be the reason why Nvidia's drivers don't work right. They're using the same chip and should be compatible, but aren't.)

[oldpx]

nVidia doesn't host old drivers but some 3d sites do. www.guru3d.com for example, they have a lot of different detonator versions and a forum as well.

[Drake1009]

Thanks Burseg. Now I just need to free up some of my bandwidth, then I could give it a whirl and hope I don't come to as near a reboot as I did with the others.

[Ian]

Have you tried going to your GFX card manufacturers web site?

Not all of them follow Nvidia's rule to the letter and do things differently from how they should, this might be causing your problem's.

Download the latest driver's from their web site.

I'm using the 23.12 driver's from the Windows update webshite and all is working fine, but I do have a different card from you.

I have tested all the leaked beta version's and the offical 23.11 (or 23.12 WHQL drivers) are faster/better.

If my/Burseg suggestion's don't help you could try Google Groups (http://www.google.co.uk/grphp?hl=en) and do a search for the problems your having. Most problems will have been already discussed in there.

[Drake1009]

Well I'm running the newest Drivers Asus bothered to make for the Geforce 1 card right now, and have no problems with them other than the crash of WinUAE which could be influenced by something else. It doesn't quite add up in my head that the JIT settings are suddently wrong because of a change of CPU, but then what do I know.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Gawd, what a mess of a machine the PC is. These are the types of discussions I used to laugh at back in the BBS days. Amazing amount of work and research and troubleshooting involved just for the privilege to changing a graphics card! I need to get a new one for my PC for many reasons, but I don't know how and when I can ever begin to put myself through the trials and pains of what I am reading here...

[Drake1009]

For me I put myself through it when my computer was old enough to really need an upgrade (133 Mhz upgraded to fastest processor available then (533)). It never worked properly. Amiga emulation on WinUAE gave me a max of 25 frames when I had sound enabled. It was crash prone as h*ll, my USB slots didn't work right and harddisk access was extremely slow. For me the upgrade to my current computer solved almost all of the problems except the crash with WinUAE which I think might be solvable with proper settings.