Frontier: WHDLoad vs Standard HD install?

[Amiga1992]

Is there any advantage to using Frontier under WHDLoad? As far as I remember this game installs happily on a hard drive and also works well on expanded Amigas.

I want to start playing this again and my 030 A1200 gives me beautiful performance on this game, just wondering what is the best version.

There's also DJay's Special Edition, which I don't think is supported by WHDLoad: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=57905
I think that could be the one to play with nowadays, any opinions?

Also is it me or the difference between running this on a 50Mhz 030 and an 80Mhz 060 is non-existent? From what I've seen on Youtube, all the 060 Amigas play this game at about the same fast speed as my 030, but I never did a side by side comparison.

[Steve T]

030/30Mhz runs it OK here, but i would like it to run smoother 50Mhz would probably be enough most of the time, more than probably, but the framerate in this game is so variable anyway depending on where you are and what you're looking at... have a shootout with the cops over a city in a complicated star system and see. I'm sure i've seen comparison videos showing the game running better on an 060, and even between different 060's, can't find any links though, sorry.

When coming back to it I've played (DOS versions aside) the WHDload, standard, CD32 and the special DJ version, I also think the latter is the best version improving the CD32 version which I think allows more geometric detail than the original floppy release (does it have the FFE nav computer? can't remember). I keep regular installed HD games along with WHDload, but tend to forget about them when looking for something to play

[Daedalus]

I notice a slight difference between an 030 and an 060 with Frontier. It's noticeable but not as big a difference as you would expect from the difference in the chips. I suspect that at maximum detail, in a busy environment there's just too much drawing to do for the chipset so that becomes the bottleneck instead of the 3D & physics calculations.

As for WHDLoad, I can't think of any benefits over just having it on the hard drive. Perhaps it gets rid of the copy protection and gives you an exit option. I had a patched version that gave the exit option and just put up with the copy protection. The CD32 version does indeed have the nav computer from FFE, which is a nice little perk, and a couple of extra models here and there.

I tried DJay's special edition a while ago but couldn't get it to run smoothly for some reason. It's possible some of the modifications don't play nicely with an 060 because the framerate was far lower than the original version.

[Retro1234]

if it seems the same speed on 68060 as 68000 maybe its because its so tied to the blitter maybe something like Fblit or BlazeWCP could make a difference? if the game is system friendly.

[Daedalus]

No, it's not system-friendly and I'm pretty sure it doesn't use the OS drawing routines, but accesses the chipset directly. The original is like a different game if you compare it on a 68000 to a 68060 so my guess is that one of the patches involved has introduced an opcode that the 060 has to emulate, thus slowing it down. Not a big deal anyway since the original is still perfectly playable.

[Steve T]

Is it better to run the Amiga in NTSC/60hz for this game? (or maybe in general?) I've read that when accelerated this helps, i guess that makes sense if its bottlenecked on the chipset? but this only works for the disk version because you need to boot in that mode, not sure if any of that is true...

Some games let you switch as a game option like F117A, which if anything looks better, with reduced borders/larger display area in 60hz.

[Daedalus]

In theory you can get a higher framerate and smoother play on NTSC since most games are synced to video frames. Extra horsepower can help here if calculating a frame takes close to the full length of the frame (or multiple frame), so I guess it might be worth checking out. There is a patch for Frontier that makes it run in NTSC mode even when launched from a PAL setup, however this gave me funky / corrupt colours so I never tested it properly.

Back in my pre-graphics-card days I generally ran the machine with an NTSC screenmode anyway for the nicer display refresh on the 1084 monitor.

[Steve T]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

There is a patch for Frontier that makes it run in NTSC mode even when launched from a PAL setup, however this gave me funky / corrupt colours so I never tested it properly.

I've had colour corruption a few times with it in PAL mode. As i understand it, forcing a PAL machine into NTSC mode is not not exactly the same as running a NTSC machine, like the oscillator ends up at a slightly different frequency than it would be in a native NTSC machine.

[Daedalus]

This is true, I can't understand how this might cause the corruption, but I guess there could easily be some precision timing tricks going on behind the scenes that cause issues like that.

[Enverex]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

if it seems the same speed on 68060 as 68000 maybe its because its so tied to the blitter maybe something like Fblit or BlazeWCP could make a difference? if the game is system friendly.

Really? There was a MASSIVE increase in performance/smoothness when I went from my 600 to 1200 with 040 in it.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Enverex

Really? There was a MASSIVE increase in performance/smoothness when I went from my 600 to 1200 with 040 in it.

Which clearly indicates that the game is not limited by the blitter. Otherwise it would hit a performance wall pretty early on since the AGA blitter is the same as the ECS one. I actually would not be surprised if it did not use the blitter at all, for some reason I doubt they took pain to write a mixed CPU/blitter filling routine but obviously I am just speculating here so I may be wrong.

[Zetr0]

For a quick and cheap 20% speed boost, run the game in NTSC (60hz PAL) mode - same with Wing Commander and anything else that ventures to poly's on the native Amiga screen mode =)

[Enverex]

Would that apply when the system itself is struggling to run the game at full speed? That seems like it would increase the maximum possible framerate rather than magically increase current constrained performance.

[Zetr0]

Originally Posted by Enverex

Would that apply when the system itself is struggling to run the game at full speed? That seems like it would increase the maximum possible framerate rather than magically increase current constrained performance.

The Chip Set will run (process) about 20% faster than in 50hz PAL as it is linked to the Video Clock .

Obviously this will reduce one bottleneck (video processing) but not the CPU processing. Obviously that can be alleviated with a faster processing unit.

Running the Game on my 060@80 / 60Hz PAL is pretty damn impressive - yet when I run this on the Vampire 2 A600 in 60Hz PAL it beats the 060 on the intro by a good 5 seconds

I hope to have some videos up soon showing the 030 / 060 and Vampire accelerators off - this is one of the games I will be highlighting.

[idrougge]

Running Frontier in NTSC mode will mean that the entire screen is used instead of the letterbox approach used. But it will also lead to oval planets.

[Zetr0]

@idrougge

Its not that bad... the speed benefit more than makes up for it.

[Amiga1992]

Here's one reason to use WHDLoad over DJay's version: you can boot it in NTSC.
When ran from HD, the official game (and DJay's version) switches the display back to PAL after booting. Anybody knows how to avoid that? When I ran this from floppy my solution was to use TUDE or some other boot tool to force an NTSC system.

The other reason to use WHDLoad is the ability to quit back to the Workbench. This is cool.


The WHDLoad version doesn't seem to be able to overwrite a save. I think this was a problem with the original, haven'tried with DJay's version that.


One more problem: I remember my old cracked version having this isue that, after a system jump, if you set a destination and set the speed to 4x, an enemy ship will IMMEDIATELY appear out of nowhere. This happens EVERY time with DJay's version but not as often with the WHDLoad version. Is it a bug, copy protection, or what?

I usually have to gradually up the speed to 3X and not more than that or the ship appears out of nowhere again. And it's pretty much impossible to fight ships at the beginning, at least for me.

Originally Posted by idrougge

Running Frontier in NTSC mode will mean that the entire screen is used instead of the letterbox approach used. But it will also lead to oval planets.

Not on my setup, if you missed the discussion on the NTSC thread, my monitor makes up for it. I gotta post videos soon, I recorded this weekend.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

The Chip Set will run (process) about 20% faster than in 50hz PAL as it is linked to the Video Clock .

I keep forgetting that as well. I wonder if it is possible to maintain a semblance of PAL compatible timings while having the clock run at NTSC speed, either on ECS+ or via V/HPOSW trickery.

Originally Posted by Zetr0

Running the Game on my 060@80 / 60Hz PAL is pretty damn impressive - yet when I run this on the Vampire 2 A600 in 60Hz PAL it beats the 060 on the intro by a good 5 seconds

Which means that it either it is not using the blitter at all or it is using a mixed CPU/Blitter filling routine which dynamically allocates time to each depending on CPU speed (extremely unlikely given it was a port).

Does anyone have an original for sale? I want to test it in UAE.

[Steve T]

Originally Posted by Akira

One more problem: I remember my old cracked version having this isue that, after a system jump, if you set a destination and set the speed to 4x, an enemy ship will IMMEDIATELY appear out of nowhere. This happens EVERY time with DJay's version but not as often with the WHDLoad version. Is it a bug, copy protection, or what?

I usually have to gradually up the speed to 3X and not more than that or the ship appears out of nowhere again. And it's pretty much impossible to fight ships at the beginning, at least for me.


Not on my setup, if you missed the discussion on the NTSC thread, my monitor makes up for it. I gotta post videos soon, I recorded this weekend.

The enemies will often spawn on hitting the max time skipper thingy, in that mode the autopilot will behave differently as well (its a good way to stop the autopilot from killing you on landing / docking iirc). I'm sure I've noticed differences in the versions, for example in one version (possibly PC, or original Amiga disk) you might be ambushed by several ships at a time, other versions will feed enemies to your lasers one at a time.

I certainly prefer running a megadrive with a 60hz mod, just for the fuller use of the screen - Is there a separate discussion of NTSC elsewhere, i searched and couldn't find it here, do you have a link? thanks!

[iddqd]

Originally Posted by Akira

....just wondering what is the best version.

pioneer the FOSS remake of the game?

Too bad it doesn't run on Amiga, though.