WinUAE 1.4.6 public beta series

[Toni Wilen]

Read before replying: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=26715

Basically 1.4.5 fix version + something "small" that didn't get included in 1.4.5..

1.4.6 will be the last Windows 98/ME compatible version. Following version (1.5.0?) will require Windows 2000 or newer.

http://www.winuae.net/files/b/winuae_1460b1.zip

Beta 1:

- ESS Mega (CDTV) "hidden" data track now reads properly on W2K/XP (uses SPTI READ_CD SCSI command if ReadFile() returns zero bytes. This is getting quite messy, mixing IOCTL, MCI and SPTI, Windows version specific read modes etc..) NOTE: SPTI requires exclusive access (IOCTL does not) so make sure no other program (including Windows explorer) do not have any open handles.
- crash when program executes any 68k command that causes a-line exception and pc was in first 64K of chip ram (145b1x)
- added inverted mouse/analog joystick input events
- 'none' input event was incorrectly parsed causing all following 'sub configuration' entries to be ignored
- added friendly name and not so friendly (GUID) device names to input configuration file (so that we can match devices if they change or configuration gets moved between PCs, see below)
- input device insertion/removal on the fly supported (Windows 2K+) Lots of bugs expected.. (ports-panel settings are not updated yet)
- fixed mouse not capturing (Windows 98/ME mainly)
- dynamic JIT direct memory allocation, can now have max 1G of Z3 fast or 512M RTG RAM (both not possible at the same time, automatically lowers memory settings until allocation succeeds) Max 2G Z3 possible when 98/ME support is gone (need also 64-bit OS) Extremely pointless feature.

[Ed Cruse]

With the live logging on (-log), I see "FILE SYS: flushing cache unit 0
(max 0 item)", print to the window 12 times, wait about six seconds and then print 12 more. It keeps going on like that forever. This is true for my 2GHz/XP computer and my 450MHz/XP computer.

The emulation stops momentarily. On my fast computer I don't notice,
but it's very noticeable with my slow computer, the mouse pointer stops
or stutters very badly for about 3/4 of second every six seconds. It
appears the only time it does this is if the partition that gets booted is a
directory drive, and it doesn't matter which unit it happens to be. Hardfiles don't have the problem at all regardless of which unit they are. I first noticed with 1460b1 but it seems to have started with 1440. In the flushing cache message, the unit number displayed is the booted directory drive's unit number. I tried using A4000 quick start, turned off just about everything, and it still does it.

[Ed Cruse]

I'm still only seeing 512megs Z3 ram and only 256megs RTG ram, I lowered the RTG ram but I still only see 512megs of Z3. My peek commit charge is 856megs so I should have more then enough virutal ram for 1gig. I'm thinking I don't totally understand what the change log is telling me.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Ed Cruse

I'm still only seeing 512megs Z3 ram and only 256megs RTG ram, I lowered the RTG ram but I still only see 512megs of Z3. My peek commit charge is 856megs so I should have more then enough virutal ram for 1gig. I'm thinking I don't totally understand what the change log is telling me.

Check the log for more information. For example WinUAE refuses to allocate more virtual RAM than available physical RAM. (How much do you have? Probably need more than 2G if you want 1G of Z3 in WinUAE. Perhaps even 64-bit Windows. Not sure)

Note that WinUAE needs to allocate 16M (24 bit address space) + 240M (space between 0x01000000 - 0x10000000) + size of Z3 fast + 16M + size of RTG contiguous virtual RAM. "Only" 2G is available for allocation.

ADDED: I refuse to allow users to select more Amiga-side RAM than PC has physical RAM. It only causes stupid so called bug reports..

print to the window 12 times, wait about six seconds and then print 12 more. It keeps going on like that forever

You have some stupid Amiga-side utility.

[Ed Cruse]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Check the log for more information. For example WinUAE refuses to allocate more virtual RAM than available physical RAM. (How much do you have? Probably need more than 2G if you want 1G of Z3 in WinUAE. Perhaps even 64-bit Windows. Not sure)

Note that WinUAE needs to allocate 16M (24 bit address space) + 240M (space between 0x01000000 - 0x10000000) + size of Z3 fast + 16M + size of RTG contiguous virtual RAM. "Only" 2G is available for allocation.

ADDED: I refuse to allow users to select more Amiga-side RAM than PC has physical RAM. It only causes stupid so called bug reports..



You have some stupid Amiga-side utility.

I have only 1gig of memory, I thought it was something like that.

With the pause problem, I don't think I have any stupid amiga-side utility.

The testing was done with WinUAE on a flash drive so I can easily test with both of my computers. I created two hardfiles and two directory drives. The two system drives and two work drives are identical. The log messages and pauses only occur when I boot to the system directory drive. It doesn't matter what position in the harddrive panel, what combination of the four drives I use, or what other drives are present.

When the pause occurs with the slow computer, cpu usage barely changes on the Amiga side, but goes from 50% to 85% on the windows side. With the fast computer the only thing I see is the log messages. I
think I can see small spikes every six seconds on the second core but I'm not sure.

The emulation appears to stop briefly (mouse pointer stops) so I'd say it's the cpu emulation thread that's flushing the directory drive's cache 12 times every six seconds. A little excessive I'd say.

[turrican3]

Toni,
i have 2 gig and it's not possible for me to have more than 512 mega z3, then perhaps 64 bits only ?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Ed Cruse

The emulation appears to stop briefly (mouse pointer stops) so I'd say it's the cpu emulation thread that's flushing the directory drive's cache 12 times every six seconds. A little excessive I'd say.
[/SIZE]

It has to be something on your Amiga installation doing that. WinUAE does that only when drive is inserted/ejected.

[Ed Cruse]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Check the log for more information. For example WinUAE refuses to allocate more virtual RAM than available physical RAM. (How much do you have? Probably need more than 2G if you want 1G of Z3 in WinUAE. Perhaps even 64-bit Windows. Not sure)

Note that WinUAE needs to allocate 16M (24 bit address space) + 240M (space between 0x01000000 - 0x10000000) + size of Z3 fast + 16M + size of RTG contiguous virtual RAM. "Only" 2G is available for allocation.

ADDED: I refuse to allow users to select more Amiga-side RAM than PC has physical RAM. It only causes stupid so called bug reports..



You have some stupid Amiga-side utility.

OK, I need to ask a stupid question. If you don't have enough ram does the Z3 slider not show you 1gig? The most it shows going to the right is 512megs. The edited part of your last message makes it sound that way..

[Mad-Matt]

Is this even a problem ? making a config that never existed on a real amiga and doesnt really benefit any amiga software in anyway bar 3d rendering, but teven then they didnt assume huge ammount of mem. 256mb z3 and 32mb rtg should be all thats needed and max allowed in emu so that such issues never arrise

[Steve]

Originally Posted by Mad-Matt

Is this even a problem ? making a config that never existed on a real amiga and doesnt really benefit any amiga software in anyway bar 3d rendering, but teven then they didnt assume huge ammount of mem. 256mb z3 and 32mb rtg should be all thats needed and max allowed in emu so that such issues never arrise

I agree actually. Allowing you to allocate massive amounts of memory is just pointless. You'll never need that much memory for Amiga emulation. I think it should be kept at 512MB Z3 and 128 Gfx RAM though even that amount is quite over the top. This is one of the things that should be in the 'most pointless' thread because it is a totally pointless feature.

I can see many newbies to WinUAE having problems by trying to add more RAM then they actually have installed on their PC. Then you'll have to explain about 1000 times why the emulator crashes when they try to use 2 gig of RAM. Not a good idea.

[Romanujan]

Originally Posted by Steve

I agree actually. Allowing you to allocate massive amounts of memory is just pointless. You'll never need that much memory for Amiga emulation. I think it should be kept at 512MB Z3 and 128 Gfx RAM though even that amount is quite over the top. This is one of the things that should be in the 'most pointless' thread because it is a totally pointless feature.

But we are not discussing whether the feature is pointless or not, we are talking whether this feature works or not. I've got 2GB of RAM and a 32-bit Vista - and I am also unable to move the slider to have more than 512MB Z3 Fast (but I am able to select up to 256MB RTG). Are there any more requirements for more than 512MB Z3 Fast? Maybe some checkbox to set? I was trying to set this starting from both A4000 quickstart configurations and it didn't work.

BTW. Hi all, this is my first post here

[Ed Cruse]

Originally Posted by Mad-Matt

Is this even a problem ? making a config that never existed on a real amiga and doesnt really benefit any amiga software in anyway bar 3d rendering, but teven then they didnt assume huge ammount of mem. 256mb z3 and 32mb rtg should be all thats needed and max allowed in emu so that such issues never arrise

Your absolutely correct most of the time, rarely does anybody with an Amiga need that much memory, but I did once and I may again. I wrote a program that required an array that was 512 megs, I wasn't able to get one big chunk of memory that big so I had to break the array up which made the program more difficult to write and slower. I took about 20 minutes to run. It would have been real nice to have 1gig of Z3 ram, but obviously you need plenty of physical ram otherwise the swap file would go crazy.

[Ed Cruse]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Check the log for more information. For example WinUAE refuses to allocate more virtual RAM than available physical RAM. (How much do you have? Probably need more than 2G if you want 1G of Z3 in WinUAE. Perhaps even 64-bit Windows. Not sure)

Note that WinUAE needs to allocate 16M (24 bit address space) + 240M (space between 0x01000000 - 0x10000000) + size of Z3 fast + 16M + size of RTG contiguous virtual RAM. "Only" 2G is available for allocation.

ADDED: I refuse to allow users to select more Amiga-side RAM than PC has physical RAM. It only causes stupid so called bug reports..



You have some stupid Amiga-side utility.

I figured out what was causing the excessive cache flushing. I wouldn't call it stupid Amiga-side utility but a stupid Amiga-side preference editor. It was caused by the Workbench editor inside of preferences, it allows you to blank drives from showing on the WB. It's not very happy if workbench.prefs tells it to blank drives that don't exist. When I copied my Amiga from my harddrive to my flashdrive several drives didn't make the trip, they were backup drives.

Sorry for the bad the bug report.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Ed Cruse

I figured out what was causing the excessive cache flushing. I wouldn't call it stupid Amiga-side utility but a stupid Amiga-side preference editor. It was caused by the Workbench editor inside of preferences, it allows you to blank drives from showing on the WB. It's not very happy if workbench.prefs tells it to blank drives that don't exist. When I copied my Amiga from my harddrive to my flashdrive several drives didn't make the trip, they were backup drives.

This may be proper bug after all. Just requesting current number of filesystem buffers (same as addbuffers does without buffer parameter) flushed the cache. Fixed in next beta. (just a guess but that would be logical explanation.)

Note that buffers returned is always 50 and is totally bogus value anyway. All cache is in emulation-side buffers, totally outside of Amiga memory but we need to return something that looks sane enough to not confuse any Amiga-side programs

Allowing you to allocate massive amounts of memory is just pointless.

It isn't totally pointless feature. It can be quite handy bug-checking feature, easy to see, for example, if any Amiga-side utility that shows amount of (total|free|available) memory dies or corrupts memory because it sees "too much" memory

Anyway, next beta should allow 1G selection if you have at least 2G of RAM.

[Ed Cruse]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

This may be proper bug after all. Just requesting current number of filesystem buffers (same as addbuffers does without buffer parameter) flushed the cache. Fixed in next beta. (just a guess but that would be logical explanation.)

Note that buffers returned is always 50 and is totally bogus value anyway. All cache is in emulation-side buffers, totally outside of Amiga memory but we need to return something that looks sane enough to not confuse any Amiga-side programs



It isn't totally pointless feature. It can be quite handy bug-checking feature, easy to see, for example, if any Amiga-side utility that shows amount of (total|free|available) memory dies or corrupts memory because it sees "too much" memory

Anyway, next beta should allow 1G selection if you have at least 2G of RAM.

Could you make it so that regardless of how much physical ram, the next beta allow you to select 1gig. My slow computer has only 256megs but I can still select 512megs, when it comes up WinUAE limits the Amiga to 256megs of Z3. I'm suggesting that you stay with the same idea. With that idea my new computer, which has 1g, would be allowed to have 1g of Z3. That won't cause a problem unless I actually use that much, all I really won't is to be able to allocate a contiguous 512meg block of memory or maybe a little more. With Z3 at 512meg that's usually not possible. When the Amiga comes up the largest block is 32 bytes short of 512megs. 1gig would nicely deal with that. If I do need a lot more the computer will simply slow down, in which case I'll buy some more ram. I may anyway.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Ed Cruse

Could you make it so that regardless of how much physical ram, the next beta allow you to select 1gig. My slow computer has only 256megs but I can still select 512megs, when it comes up WinUAE limits the Amiga to 256megs of Z3. I'm suggesting that you stay with the same idea. With that idea my new computer, which has 1g, would be allowed to have 1g of Z3. That won't cause a problem unless I actually use that much, all I really won't is to be able to allocate a contiguous 512meg block of memory or maybe a little more. With Z3 at 512meg that's usually not possible. When the Amiga comes up the largest block is 32 bytes short of 512megs. 1gig would nicely deal with that. If I do need a lot more the computer will simply slow down, in which case I'll buy some more ram. I may anyway.

Problem is that 512M of Z3 requires 256M + size of Z3 + sizeof RTG RAM (as explained previously) because <0x10000000 is not really usable for Z3 expansions. (without all kinds of side-effects I don't want to think about..)

JIT direct requires whole emulated address space in one huge contiguous chunk.

[Toni Wilen]

http://www.winuae.net/files/b/winuae_1460b2.zip

Beta 2:

- sprites outside bitplane area (AGA feature) was not working in all bitplane/sprite resolution combinations (broke when shres was added)
- relaxed Z3/RTG max RAM limits slightly (NOTE: it is 100% your problem if you select too much RAM resulting in massive paging and hd trashing)
- systray icon was not always removed
- fullscreen mode fallback fixes (145b18)
- do not flush directory filesystem cache if ACTION_MORE_CACHE is called with dp_Arg == 0, return current number of buffers only
- ports-panel joystick/mouse friendly/guid name saved to config file, no more changed selected devices if you save config, exit WinUAE, insert or remove some input device(s) and then reload the config

- joystick/mouse autoselection, input compatibility mode: Press any unselected joystick's button 0 to "insert" it in Amiga port 1 (joystick port) and button 1 to "insert" it in port 0 (mouse port). Same with any unselected mouse except left mouse button = port 0 (mouse port) and right mouse button = port 1 (joystick port).

- joystick/mouse autoselection, input configuration mode, differences compared to compatibility mode:
* because you can have mappings to multiple ports, device's first port related mapping in input-panel is decided as the only port number when doing remappings. When switching, only mappings that have same port number are remapped to new port. Old mappings that already have new port number will be remapped to old port number. Other mappings are not changed.
* all other devices that are mapped to same port as new device will be disabled
* only devices that are disabled (checkbox on right side of device name is not ticked) are available for autoselection
* mouse switching is disabled if there are any "supermouse" mice enabled (Windows mouse etc..) because it would cause total confusion. Rawmouse or catweasel mouse are "safe".

Note: joystick button 0 has to select port 1 because for example Amiga joysticks in PC adapter may only have one button and generally you want joysticks in port 1.

Just insert any plug&play compatible joystick on the fly and press first button. Can't get any easier!

[hexaae]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

http://www.winuae.net/files/b/winuae_1460b2.zip

Beta 2:

- systray icon was not always removed

Still multiple tray icons if you change Filter settings. I have saved 2 filters: NTSC (stretched vertically) and PAL. Everytime I press F12 and change the filters (PAL<->NTSC) within an already running game, a new WUAE tray icon is left

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by hexaae

Still multiple tray icons if you change Filter settings. I have saved 2 filters: NTSC (stretched vertically) and PAL. Everytime I press F12 and change the filters (PAL<->NTSC) within an already running game, a new WUAE tray icon is left

Details, details.. What filter? Windowed or fullscreen? Change what? ("change filter settings" = zero information)

EDIT: still can't duplicate. Systray icon disappears and reappears when I change display modes or filter modes, anything. I'll have to ignore this if I don't get other reports.

[Thom87]

I think that this can be gui bug: when I running beta 1.4.6(1&2) and then change page to the cpu settings JIT switch-Force Settings is always selected and it's not possible to deselect it, to do this I have to deselect JIT and select again. After that Force Settings working fine to the moment exit of WinUAE. Situation back again on next run. The same think is when configuration will saved witch beta but will working fine with stable.
Stable 1.4.4 i 1.4.5 have no this problem, and this is no matter if settings are saved in registry or winuae.ini file. For tests I created a new folder witch no config and I removed configuration from registry.

I apologize for my English and I hope this is understandable.
Thom