Amiberry 5.6.x on x86-64 vs Sounds of Gnome

[giantclam]

This is an extension of my tinkerings with LFS and Amiga emulation ...but that thread is in support.fs-uae and amiberry isn't that...

...hence this thread, wrt amiberry 5.6.x on platform x86-64 ... which is considered experimental, and thus the sorts of things I'm running across, I'm kinda expecting/forgiving of, in the same way I used to giggle & smile when Enlightenment DR13 decided to crash when you looked at it the wrong way... lol ..

...since forever, right, one of my goto psuedo benchmark disks for uae engines, is SoundsofGnome.dms That's just due to how 'busy' the audio/display is all of the time across multiple bitplanes (not to mention the gr8 tunes) ~ in times past, this was one demodisk that could slow&stutter just about any uae engine.

Just briefly.. the machine is HP 800 G1 Core i5 4670 thin client, intel haswell/q87 with HD4600 IGP (i915) -- display is 5:4 aspect, native resolution of 1280x1024@60Hz. The linux system itself is LFS 11.3 based, with Xorg (+ ice-wm), and all dependencies to clone/compile amiberry from the github repo. The fs-uae engine (4.0.78) is also installed for comparative running/testing. For some overall sanity, I double check results on this Debian 10.13 system, which adds the extra fruitiness of running nvidia GPU/drivers (GeForce GTX 750/418.226.00 driver) ; this box has a 16:10 widescreen display 1920x1080@60Hz

Note my initial intention was just to hoist an issue on the amiberry github page about some of this, but after poking at it with a big stick long enough, I realized I'm not entirely sure what to describe the issue as... ie; doing the same things on the debian box, resulted in wildly different results =) Also, I'm none too sure how many folks keep older 4:3/5:4 aspect displays around, to muck about with Amiga stuffs...I'll likely post this & github issue ...ie; maybe more folks will see this here, and try it on differing hardware/linux to see where the silly walk goes..

I'll have to find my VGA capture/encoder box so as to show some of these antics ; some things that happen are... sublime ...but in the meanwhile, words and pictures it is ...of quest for gnome sounds using amiberry...

-- start amiberry, default A500 config, add soundsofgnome.dms (and in my case amigaforever 1.3 kickrom), don't touch anything else and leave display in windowed mode, give the config a new name and save it. Now..start the engine...viewport window drops back to 720x568, disk image loads start screen, then into the music demo mainscreen itself, and immediately there's a visual glitch -- the left display blank border is half the width (or less) of the right border, and the scrolling banner at the bottom isn't displayed right on righthand side...




...so, ok then, hit F12 to get GUI, click restart...and muggins here sees the 'correct aspect ratio' widget is ticked..




...let's try turning that off....start engine...




.. lol, m'kay... as you can see, the ice-wm taskbar is still visible at the bottom, so it's kinda opened fullscreen as active desktop background, and somehow somewhere, X is still in native 1280x1024@60Hz...?..ice-wm taskbar says so, hit F12....




...M'kay, true..still at native res, and as far as amiberry is concerned we're in windowed mode .. and it's still not rendering the soundsofgnome screen properly...bail, F12, click restart ...'this must be some experimental feature', he says to himself...

..where do you go from here?...fullscreen mode?...I have a couple of tries, it works but dammit dammit dammit, still not getting things right in the menuscreen of gnomes, and then I try this display configuration...




...start engine, display goes black and returns, looking like this...




...m'kay, that's different =) It's not just that it's apparently & obviously configured to be doing fullscreen @ 1280x1024 ... and ended up popping a (SDL?) 800x600 viewport top-left, no borders, and also the fact it's displaying the bottom left portion of the demo menu -- hitting F12 confirms this...




...might be clue or coincidence, but what's needed is crazy ... hit Alt-Tab to minimize the (borderless) viewport, hit Alt-Tab again...




...bingo! There's the pearl, gnome menu screen rendering correctly, and all's good ...well, nearly... now I've got it this far, it's not responding to the F12 key, and Alt-F4 refuses to respond either ..hmm... Alt-triple-fast-tab...(goodgrief) ..that somehow regrabs kbd input... F12 works again, amiberry GUI is fullscreen, and according to Xorg we're at 1280x1024...wait up, now I can't Alt-Tab back to desktop?....hmmm...apparently not <grin>... so it seems like I'm headed for an Alt-F4 ending, or F12 to GUI for a way out... BUT ...

..it is running the soundsofgnome music demo disk, fullscreen, and rendering everything properly...it's just taken over the machine in a way...hang about, what if I Ctl-Alt-F3 to another tty?...yep, that works, amiberry keeps on running.. Ctl-Alt-F7 back to the Xorg session...oh, hello, we're at the ice-wm desktop, and soundsofgnome replay is stuttering wildly... Alt-Tab to the amiberry process, sound comes good, keeps on running, F12 still works... and I can Alt-Tab back to desktop again ..haha.. impressive ~ nothing's crashed yet =)

So the Sounds of Gnome demo disk -can- be run correctly by amiberry, but where this gets annoying, is when you're trying the light-up something like a ClassicWB config with A4000 spec, and it doesn't jump straight to fullscreen and start workbench, and you have to alt-tab around this glitche --- on the small percentage of times it DOES just switch straight into fullscreen mode, it's *awesome* ... like, the juxposition of going from a very plain, iconless ice-wm desktop environment, to a fully lush & pretty Amiga iconized workbench desktop environment, in near literally the 'blink of an eye'....

On this hardware running soundsofgnome, the amiberry process consumes around 30% of 1 CPU core, using 150.9mb ram resident.. fs-uae will use 115% CPU and 144mb doing the same emulation task. There's not much between the 2 ... fs-uae gets the same issue drawing the demo menu righthand border wrong, but I haven't tried futzing with it's config yet.. but to the naked eye, fs-uae is a tiny bit smoother overall...I'll have to find the vga capture box...

note: doing this on the nvidia gpu/drivers was much worse, with it setting the default res of 800x600 to desktop, and manual intervention required to recover the default 1920x1080 res..

Considering amiberry has/is not really specifically aimed at x86-64 linux targets and still considered experimental as such, amiberry does a pretty good job with Amiga emulation imho... and considering I didn't need gtk+ nor Qt or anything else to arrive at a functional uae control GUI for the underlying uae engine, it's a nice small footprint Amiga emulator end of the day. Ultimately, it depends on how many Amiga softwares (of all types) it runs/supports without issues. It certainly didn't seem to have any issue running AmigaOS 3.x images/setups I have around to throw at it.


..oh, it -does- have an issue with jesus-on-E's , so at a guess there'll be other titles..


Just thinking about it, if it's working fine on this desktop/thin-client class machine with intel IGP, one would have to imagine that due to amiberry's much lower cpu utilization, it might be the better uae engine choice if you were on a laptop and cared about battery run time etc.


Apols for the grungy 'phone pics.. time to dig through some boxes for that converter..