Unique - Origins on Pistorm32

[nikosidis]

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[khph_re]

Lovely Demo and runs very well.

How compatible is Pistorm32 with scene stuff? And what is the speed like compared to an
060?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by khph_re

How compatible is Pistorm32 with scene stuff?

Mileage varies. Emu68 has no MMU and the FPU is not 100% compatible.

Originally Posted by khph_re

And what is the speed like compared to an 060?

Emu68 is an order of 10x magnitude faster (PiStorm32 + RPI4) for some operations. So lots of things run too fast. Use of turning off caches and other tweaks (sometimes at runtime) can help make it better but mileage varies. Join the Discord discussions to get advice.

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by khph_re

Lovely Demo and runs very well.

How compatible is Pistorm32 with scene stuff? And what is the speed like compared to an
060?

The good thing first. The speed compared to 060 is quite crazy. With Pi 3 it is 900MIPS. With Pi 4 it is quite a bit more. At least for demo scene stuff it is quite overkill. Instead of using internal IDE you can use a micro-sd as HDD.
Internal IDE will give you max 3MB sec. on any config. micro-sd on Pi will give you around 22MB sec.



As Pistorm32 been around only for a few months there is still some stuff to do to make it more compatible. With games I would say 90% run good.
With scene stuff (OCS demos I will not include as it will at least be no better than any other AGA machine) maybe 70% are good for now. There is a tool where you can tweak the JIT enigne to run slower. That can help with some demos. I am quite sure that with JIT you will never see 100% of AGA demos run perfect but it will be better than now.


Other thing you can do is to disable Pistorm. That way you can run anything at stock A1200 configuration.

[alexh]

To be fair to the PiStorm team a lot of these issues are bugs in the original program exposed due to the speed, ones that in theory could be fixed using newer WHDload slaves in the future.

Originally Posted by nikosidis

Other thing you can do is to disable Pistorm. That way you can run anything at stock A1200 configuration.

Unfortunately the current PiStorm32 design doesn't support FastRAM when disabled so you're stuck with just 2MB ChipRAM.

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by alexh

To be fair to the PiStorm team a lot of these issues are bugs in the original program exposed due to the speed, ones that in theory could be fixed using newer WHDload slaves in the future.


Unfortunately the current PiStorm32 design doesn't support FastRAM when disabled so you're stuck with just 2MB ChipRAM.

Yes, that is true but it is really not a big problem. There is almost not a single game that require more than that. For whd-load that is a problem unless you have a Pcmcia RAM card. My solution is to use a Gotek drive for the few things I want to run beside Pistorm. I even used the Gotek when I used Blizzard IV. Some times it is more convenient.

Put the game or demo on usb-stick and boot up the Gotek, select from the menu and run it.