[ongoing] DosBox AGA (v0.74)

[amigoun]

Its AGA only, so not possible to test now. But still it would be very slow, only PC-Task is good at speed and works fine on Vampire2.

[eXeler0]

Mike has been doing a lot of testing on the Vamp and he recently posted a bunch of vids showing PC task performance.
He says performance in DOS games is somewhere between fast 386 and fast 486.
I guess we have to wait for AGA in SAGA to get a good DosBox vs pc Task comparison..

You can find the vids in the Apollo core forums.

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[amigoun]

In fact there is an very old dosbox rtg version that I already tried and it works on Vampire2 too, but it was very slow. DOSBox is very high cpu intensive.

[eXeler0]

I guess DOSBox is more of a straight port whereas PCTack is actually optimized for Amiga. Just not the Vampire with its fancy instruction set ;-)


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[Retro1234]

I found this Command and Conquer on Amiga 600 Vampire V2 and PCTask emulator - quite impressive.
[ Show youtube player ]

any other videos?

[amigoun]

I made that video recently But remember, with real overclocked 060 CPU you can play C&C with equal speed too. Only what is missing to PC-Task is soundblaster support.
PC-Task is highly optimized and uses JIT so this is why it is so fast.

[Retro1234]

I did ask once before about the speed between PC-TASK and PCX compared to DosBox and someone said not much difference and I was Surprised as PC-TASK and PCX are supposed to have JIT
I did manage to connact the author or PC-TASK once of course Jim Drew is the author f PCX - does PCX have soundblaster support?

[amigoun]

PCX did have some very basic soundblaster DAC, but only very few games support it. Here in my other vid is the Prehistorik 2:
[ Show youtube player ]
But PCX is less compatible and slower to PC-Task. Jim Drew says he continues development of PCX so lets hope things will get better.

[Retro1234]

I saw that video, thats running on 060? how does it play on the Vampire?

[amigoun]

Yes, it was 060 clocked at 56 Mhz. PCX does not support RTG graphics, so I tested only on ECS, but it was quite the same speed.

[emufan]

Originally Posted by amigoun

I made that video recently But remember, with real overclocked 060 CPU you can play C&C with equal speed too. Only what is missing to PC-Task is soundblaster support.
PC-Task is highly optimized and uses JIT so this is why it is so fast.

you wrote about the old dos4gw replaced by dos32a.
for further reference I post here the urls i found:
DOS32A DOS Extender (old websaite)
DOS32A Advanced DOS Extender - new sf.net project page.
DOS32A HowTo (dosbox wiki)

[Sandro]

Originally Posted by amigoun

PCX did have some very basic soundblaster DAC, but only very few games support it. Here in my other vid is the Prehistorik 2:
[ Show youtube player ]
But PCX is less compatible and slower to PC-Task. Jim Drew says he continues development of PCX so lets hope things will get better.

I don't think PCX is slower or less compatible than pctask, fact is that games that fails to work on PCX not work on pctask neither
it seems both emulator share some code or some games are more problematic to be emulated
anyways name some game that works on pctask but fails on PCX

btw, PCX not only works on AGA or ECS I have a direct RTG driver for it which I tested and works on
winuae
surely this driver will accelerate emulation on a real AMiga+gfx card

[eXeler0]

Having an emulator that's still developed is worth a lot. At least there's a chance that it can be recompiled with Vampire friendly optimizations.

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[Retro1234]

Yes I think PCX is a tiny bit faster - I ran some games once Pinball Dreams 2 - Blue Brothers 2 and sandro says he has a RTG driver, overall I do prefer PC-Task but good vids.

[Sandro]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Yes I think PCX is a tiny bit faster - I ran some games once Pinball Dreams 2 - Blue Brothers 2 and sandro says he has a RTG driver, overall I do prefer PC-Task but good vids.

PCX is faster and better and easy to config and the AGA driver is very good

in my A1200 I used it to play those strong chess programs which beat Kasparov and Anand and other GM's in 1991-1995 ie Fritz,Hiarcs, Rebel
such programs work perfect in PCX and are far better and strongest than any Amiga chess program

[amigoun]

I do not want to argue with you, because you always write the opposite and never prove anything, but only a few facts: PCX does not support protected mode, and PC-Task does, PC-Task have dynamic mode that results in much faster emu than the interpretive.
RTG modes are not supported on PCX, but on PC-Task are. Only lo-res mode is claimed to be retargetable on PCX to CGX/P96, but that freezes for me.

[NovaCoder]

I've recently had some time to kill so I thought I'd revisit my old AGA port. After spending time analysing the 0.74 source code I can see that the render pipeline is expensive. I'm currently working on a new build using a native Amiga render pipeline to see if I can get it usable for some (slow-paced) DOS games.

This will be based on v6.02 with various fixes from newer versions mixed in where performance isn't impacted too much.

I'll upload something to the zone for testing on real hardware when I get it working properly. Unfortunately I don't have a real Amiga anymore so I can only test with WinUAE these days.

[gulliver]

@NovaCoder

Please consider adding RTG support, so that OCS/ECS Amigas can still use it if they have a gfx card.

[amigoun]

Glad you are willing to continue Nova! +1 for RTG support. Necessity for Vampire users.

[NovaCoder]

Yep I'll be adding RTG support when it runs properly, it's pretty easy to add rtg