Zeewolf – speed cap?
 

I tried out one of my favourite games — Zeewolf 2 — on my A600 with Furia. Unfortunately the game played sluggishly, a bit too sluggish considering it was made for a basline A500/A1200 and the Furia is quite a bit faster.

Is there some kind of speed cap on Zeewolf?

According to the WHDLoad readme caches and CPU features are enabled (and only disabled for 040/60 systems).

Zeewolf 2 can make use of Fast RAM, and runs much better when it does. I don't know much about the Furia - does it have (autoconfiguring) Fast RAM?

Indeed it does, and it's very fast RAM too.

Does this mean that the Blitter is the bottleneck in Zeewolf's performance?

That's a possibility, or it could be hard-coded to a specific framerate like F1GP. But might it also be a WHDLoad patch (maybe a blitter wait or something) that doesn't quite suit the Furia? Are you running it from floppy or hard drive?

If memory serves, Zeewolf 2 will benefit greatly from fast RAM, but Zeewolf won't. Zeewolf 2 runs pretty well on a fast RAM equipped Minimig core and absolutely flies when you allow the CPU to access chip RAM at fast RAM speeds (and runs super-fast on a Vampire, too) so I don't think the blitter's the bottleneck.

What's the chip RAM writing speed like for the Furia?
Perhaps you have a version of Zeewolf 2 that's just not picking up the Fast RAM for some reason? (On the Minimig I use one of the crack ADFs - I'll try and remember to find out which one when I get home.)

On A1200 040/40 Zeewolf 2 WHDLoad Slave 5.00 (15.08.05) it is sluggishly too.

I`m not sure about the readme if caches on 040/060 are disabled or not because:

2.01 ??/97
- disable instruction and data cache for 040/060 machines.

[...]

3.01 07/99
- added patch for blitter wait function
- added patch for self modifying code (caused crashes on 040/060)
- enable caches and CPU features for maximum speed

I suppose the caches are enabled as I was bugtesting for Girv with my A500/Blizzard 2060.

Hard drive with WHDload. Perhaps I should try out a plain floppy version.

The version I've been testing with is the Quartex crack.
MD5 5b8b0e7b8586779f54d74eb9928599c5 if you want to be sure it's the same one.