Temporarily speed up emulation ?
 

Hi!

Is there a way to temporarily speed up emulation ?

It would come handy during loading of games, which can be pretty slow.

Currently WinUAE uses about 40% of the CPU on my system, so there is enough reserve to allow a speedup.

Regards,
David

Warp mode is activated by pressing 'End' and 'Pause' at the same time. You need to press it again to deactivate it. You will see that CPU usage goes to 100% during warp. This makes makes the loading times a lot shorter :)

You can speed up floppy disk loading by going to the Floppy Drives section and changing the floppy drive emulation speed ;)

EDIT: Or... what TCD said ;)

Setting the floppy speed to 800% is also a very good idea ;) Some games don't like it, but the majority work this way.

Use warp mode, avoid floppy speed up as it doesn't actually do much during warp mode anyway, and warp mode is more likely to keep it all sync'd... only much faster :)

Turbo mode breaks the sync'ing!

No one to mention the JIT speedup feature ? This optimizer can speedup games loading tremendously, but of course at the cost of some compatibility.

Also, I usually set the priority of WinUAE process higher than normal, it won't speed up the emulation but prevents other Windows processes to interfere.

A subsidiary question : Can you tell us if you are you from the ADF or the WHDload camp :sleep :) ?

Ever tried to enable JIT with a A500 config? Bet you didn't ;)

A bit of trivia here : When I discovered the effect of the JIT emulation, I really wanted to establish a list of games that could run with it. Some Amiga game 'experts' discouraged me to make an extensive use of this feature.

Now, I have JIT and warp mode deactivated automatically with my main WinUAE config, and activated again when I have finished playing the game. A simple rule would be : Use JIT with AGA games, but it's not that simple, as old games may benefit from it, and a few AGA games might not like it.

Also, tweaking JIT itself can make it less harsh to games. (by disabling hard flush, most notably).

Finally, JIT may have other unwanted side effects, so when using AmigaOS for development, I shan't recommend turning it on.

I've been developing countless intros/demos and other stuff with enabled JIT mode (would not have been fun without JIT anyway) and I never experienced major problems. So can you please elaborate on why you can't recommend turning on JIT when using UAE for development? I'm really interested... *sigh*

Well, I was not too sure about JIT causing trouble or not under AmigaOS, since it messes up quite a few games. Thanks for making it clear there's no problem activating it when coding.

I don't code myself, I am simply "manipulating software" under the OS, once in a while, but it seems to me I have to reset the emulator a bit more often when JIT is enabled. Can't really confirm it or input it to JIT exclusively.

Is there a place where we can see your demos in action ?

I've been involved in most of the Scarab releases and made some stuff for Scoopex, DCS, Darkage, Resistance and a lot of other groups too. Most recent demo I've coded is Twenty which was released at this years Breakpoint.