WHDLoad - best platform for running demos?

[UberFreak]

Hi

My main use of the Amiga is for watching demos.
As such, for quite some time I tried finding one platform that will run the most demos available.
This proved a problematic task, as I found out there are issues with many demos on all platforms I tried.

- 060 CPU

This was the worst, out of about ~100 demos I tried (most are OCS/ECS, some AGA), only a few worked fine.
Playing with settings (Cache, VBR etc) changed the failures in some cases, but there were still many problems.
Most "popular": flashing and/or corrupted gfx & effects, effects that dont run, run too slow, run too fast, black screens.
Some demos even played in "slow motion"
I made sure to use the latest slaves, some even noted in the readme that fixes were made for 060.

A few examples:
1) Elysium/Sanity (crashes)
2) Motion/Bomb (very long black screen after loading picture - over 2 minutes, then demo runs in "slow motion")
3) Nexus7/Andromeda (plays in extreme "slow motion". Disabling caches fixes that, but then intro text gfx is corrupted & demo never advances beyond the intro)

- 030 CPU

This gave the best results. Most demos run fine, but many still exhibit slowdowns & gfx flashes in some effects (mostly on simple 3D vector stuff).

- 000 CPU (A600)

I expected this setup to run perfectly all demos intended for the A500/600, but what I got was the exact opposite - many slowdowns & gfx flashes.
I was told this is due to added blitter waits, which should not be added on 68000 CPU.


So I ask, which is the common target platform install makers go for?
I'd love to hear from other people's experiences as I'm seriously considering going the HxC route at this point

Thanks!

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by UberFreak

So I ask, which is the common target platform install makers go for?

Pretty sure it's the 030 A1200 platform.

I think an A600 with an ACA620 accelerator could be the best if you don't care about AGA.

[UberFreak]

Hi Akira

AFAIK the ACA620 uses an 68020 that's clocked about the same as the one in an A1200.
How is that different than using a vanilla A1200 with plain memory expansion?

[hansel75]

I have an A600 with a ACA620 in it, and i would say about 90+% of the ocs/ecs whdload demos i have tried on it have worked fine. The extra 13mb of fast ram on the ACA620 helps a lot to with the larger demos, and the 020 cpu makes any vector/polygon scenes in demos run very smoothly as well!

Before i got the ACA620 and i was running the stock 68000 in combo with a 2mb fast ram pcmcia card, and i was only getting around 60-70% of whdload demos working, an a600 with no fast ram at all will run even less, maybe 50% of whdload demos!

The only issue with the ACA620 that i have found is a few old adf/floppy format demos that don't run anymore, that ran fine on a vanilla A600, namely the 100 c64 tunes demo and the 3D demo II both don't like the accelerator and won't run properly with it installed.

If mostly dealing with whdload demos, then i think there is around 300-350 ocs/ecs demos in WHDload format and an A600+ACA620 will run the bulk of them fine from my experiences!

Of course if you want AGA Whdload demos then go for something like an 030 A1200!

[jPV]

Originally Posted by UberFreak

- 060 CPU

This was the worst, out of about ~100 demos I tried (most are OCS/ECS, some AGA), only a few worked fine.
Playing with settings (Cache, VBR etc) changed the failures in some cases, but there were still many problems.
Most "popular": flashing and/or corrupted gfx & effects, effects that dont run, run too slow, run too fast, black screens.
Some demos even played in "slow motion"
I made sure to use the latest slaves, some even noted in the readme that fixes were made for 060.

A few examples:
1) Elysium/Sanity (crashes)
2) Motion/Bomb (very long black screen after loading picture - over 2 minutes, then demo runs in "slow motion")
3) Nexus7/Andromeda (plays in extreme "slow motion". Disabling caches fixes that, but then intro text gfx is corrupted & demo never advances beyond the intro)

060 is quite essential if you want to watch any demos after 90's. It's been de facto platform for new demos over a decade now. If you want to watch demos you shouldn't ignore that.

Most WHDLoad demos should run fine on 060 too. Maybe you have some other issue there? Do you have proper 680x0.libraries installed? And in correct way (dummy 040 lib etc). Are you using A1200 or A4000? Which accelerator do you have?

Those mentioned demos run quite fine with my B1260. Elysium crashes after the first pics sometimes, but sometimes it runs fine.. and actually it doesn't crash whole system.. you can quit it with WHDLoad quit key and try again. Motion and Nexus7 don't have any problems, they run fast and clean. I have pretty much default WHDLoad settings and haven't touched separately on any settings for those demos.

[UberFreak]

@hansel75:

The question is not if most demos run, its how well they run
"3D Demo II" is an example of a demo which runs poorly for me on both A600 & A1200/030, the last part is completely unwatchable.
Surprisingly, it runs fine on 060...

@jPV:

I'm not ignoring 060 at all, have two such setups: A4000 with Cyberstorm mk1 and A1200 with BPPC. Demos made for 060 run fine on both (recent ones are slow on 50Mhz but thats another issue all together).

I've done WHDLoad tests on both with roughly the same results.
"Elysium" crashes always at the same point, when it reaches the effect with the cube which has scrollers on all sides.
The screen gets garbled and it exits with "Line 1111 emulator" error, when caches are enabled.
If I disable caches, it exits at the same point but with a different error (I think its "illegal instruction").

This specific demo is problematic also on 030 (several effects are very glitchy), I was only able to run it perfectly from floppy on my A600.