Warp feature - adjust speed?

[boir]

Hi, WinUAE has a neat warp feature. But it is for some uses too fast. Is there a way to adjust the speed of warp?

[boir]

No suggestions?

[Minuous]

AFAIK the only possibilities are to match A500/A1200 speed or to go as fast as possible.

Lowering the priority of WinUAE may help to slow it down.

[alexh]

Minious, you've obviously never used warp on UAE. It's like Fast Forward. Perfect for skipping boring cut scenes with no "press enter to continue"

[Toni Wilen]

If you want to adjust whole emulation speed, use chipset panel "fps.adj" option. This keeps CPU/chipset sync.

CPU speed adjustment is not same thing.

[boir]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

If you want to adjust whole emulation speed, use chipset panel "fps.adj" option. This keeps CPU/chipset sync.

CPU speed adjustment is not same thing.

I want to use the warp feature to fast forward during cutscenes/loading but I do not want it to be so very quick, 2x normal speed would be nice. Is there any way to lower the warp speed to that?

[Toni Wilen]

No. Enable more accurate modes to increase CPU load which makes warp mode slower

[boir]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

No. Enable more accurate modes to increase CPU load which makes warp mode slower

Hehe, I'll give that a shot.

[boir]

I'm opening this again. I've tried fiddling with some stuff but warp is still ultra fast. Can anyone suggest some things to set to get a slower warp mode (without messing up non warp mode)?

[Mclane]

I'm not speaking for Toni but warp for me is a bonus feature that just happens to be there if all restrictions are taken off, its not actually emulation related so what you would be asking Toni to do is spend time customising a non emulation related item just so you can skip stuff at a slower pace.

I for one can't see why Toni would use his time for such a non feature..

As said, I don't speak for anyone but myself..

[Toni Wilen]

Some configurable upper limit is at least technically possible but because it isn't useful enough feature, it won't become GUI option.

[boir]

Hi Mclane, I hear you. But one person's non feature sometimes is another person's highly useful feature. I'm coming at this from the angle of playing games. The current warp feature is so quick that it becomes counterproductive in that context. Try to skip some load time and you easily end up skipping yourself into crashing a Lotus, lose the world cup and massacre hundreds of lemmings and more - all with a press of warp button! Emulators for other platforms like the Libretro project do have customizable speedup and it is quite a useful thing once you have it. (Some also have rewind which is very fun to play around with but that is a topic for another day.)

Toni, I'm not sure if you with the last bit meant that it is a no go or that it might happen only as a config variable setting (not through the GUI). Hoping for the latter but thank you anyway for the great work you do on winUAE.

[Mclane]

A rewind function would be more useful, very handy for platformers etc but again its merely a non emulation feature which isn't Toni's main aim, get the emulation as good as possible with the emulation of certain extra hardware.

I'm not trying to be rude, just saying that Toni only has so much free time that very kindly donates to this project and naturally its more likely he will work on emulation.

And yes, one man's non feature may be great for someone else but I seriously doubt there's that many people who would use it, at the moment you can skip ahead at warp, ok its not exact for the user but its not been made as being anything other than a warp mode. A rewind mode might actually help in this area as well as being a handy tool for gamers.

BUT, is that worth dev time for Toni, I doubt it..

Trust me, I know what you are saying but its more work than a config change, he's got to make sure the warping keeps the system stable, further adjusting it only makes it all much harder leading to moans that the warp mode broke a game. Technically if you want to play a game safely you should make sure the emulator is running as close to a real Amiga as possible and following the game / programs required KS and hardware, any fancy non world tweaks only improve the chance of a dreaded guru and the fun is dead then.

[boir]

Originally Posted by Mclane

but I seriously doubt there's that many people who would use it

I don't know. The FS-UAE project (which I haven't tried yet but if I understand things correctly uses winua under the hood) has gone a long way to make amiga emulation gaming easy with a frontend and game info database so I think interest in amiga gaming might come to increase and once they see all those lemmings die from over-warp they'll come to this thread, pitchforks in hand. All joking aside I get what you're saying and I'm sure there are other things with much higher priority to do in winuae. Cheers.

[Mclane]

You never know with Toni, one day he throws his crystal ball at you and another he gives you and odd requested item

I'd say not to hold your breath tho

[alexh]

Originally Posted by boir

The current warp feature is so quick. Try to skip some load time and you easily end up skipping yourself into crashing a Lotus, lose the world cup and massacre hundreds of lemmings and more - all with a press of warp button!

Why not switch to non speed accurate disk emulation? This will safely skip most of the load time?

The warp / ffwd feature is still very good if you have a hard stop in the interaction. For example on Amberstar/Ambermoon you can FFwd the combat / magic scenes and if you over-run the game doesn't care because it just waits for your next input.

[boir]

alexh: ok I will test with that setting. Yeah in games that stop and wait for input the current warp is ok, but some games load a level and immediately start gameplay. It is also not only load time, some in game sequences can be boring/slow and useful to skip a bit in.

Another idea: maybe I can slow the warp by sending a quick scripted sequence of pause unpause commands during the warp? Tame warp speed through warp speed pause toggling, so to speak. I found an old thread about external programs talking to WinUAE where Toni wrote "WinUAE has named pipe that can be used to send input events". There is mention of a tool ipctester.exe there but I can't find it. Can someone give a link to that tool or some other e.g. command line tool or script example on how to send a command, like a letter for the winuae keyboard, from Windows? Once I have that I can test my quick pause toggling idea.

[Toni Wilen]

Warp mode speed limit is done, will be in next beta, it was much simpler than I originally assumed.

No GUI support, config file "warp_limit=max_fps" (max_fps lower than current also works..). It may be possible to allow sound when limiter is active, maybe after 3.2 is out..

Originally Posted by Mclane

A rewind function would be more useful

It is already done (re-recorder in input panel), unfortunately it is unstable (if it even works at all anymore..) . It loses sync sooner or later and finding the problem is extremely time consuming..

[Toni Wilen]

Pipe posts moved to separate thread.