Vampire II non acceleration issues

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by Akira

As i said before I think it is related to blitter waits. There is no solution so far. Reworking this slave to fix that, I've been told, would be a royal pain in the ass.

i did some digging, and found out it was related to WHDLoad disabling the CPU cache in certain situation, and your right, as i said in my very first post, running it from floppy and its well smooth, so its a WHDLoad issue.

I would agree that just more fast RAM would probably make the most compatible setup for gaming, people have said that accelerators make no difference to gaming, well i like playing polygon heavy flight sims, and FPS games, and it makes a HUGE difference, even on normal 2D games it does make a difference, sure it might be capped at 30fps, and wont go over that, but its how you get to that 30fps, in jerky vision, of buttery smooth. And TBH, its not JUST for gaming, try running OS3.9 on anything less than a fast 040, and its like using Workbench on ketamine or tramadol, its painfully slow. Uridium for example, plays more or less at the same speed unaccelerated, but the end part of each level, where you destroy the core, is far more frenetic and smoother, and dare i say it, more fun to play.

so far, Frontier, Flashback, and Zool all exhibit the slowdown, i daresay more will present themselves. I couldnt game now without an accelerator, even in 2D, and if your saying it makes no difference, then your deluding yourself. As for blitter waits, FBlit helps out with that tremendously.

[Amiga1992]

I think there's a bit of a placebo effect here, but I am willing to test real results, if I ever get a proper video capture card. Because I think the delusion comes from those who have accelerators (like me) and wanted them so bad to be effective. After you spend a considerable sum of money on one, I doubt most people are willing to admit it was actually not such a great idea. There's this "prestige" of having an accelerator that I think is total bull.

I am a huge Uridium 2 fan and I never, ever found that the scene where you are at the dreadnought core and the explosion when you exit were faster. I actually remember thinking "wtf? Why does this still slow down on my 030@50?"

Fblit is great. For workbench/system friendly stuff. It makes no difference with hardware banging games like those on WHDload. Once you kill the system, Fblit is not working.
The problem with blitter waits is not that you are not supposed to wait. The problem is that if you don't have them, and you don't wait, the CPU goes too fast and everything goes to shit. You are being confused in thinking they are a bad thing, they are actually there to make the game work.

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by Akira

I think there's a bit of a placebo effect here, but I am willing to test real results, if I ever get a proper video capture card. Because I think the delusion comes from those who have accelerators (like me) and wanted them so bad to be effective. After you spend a considerable sum of money on one, I doubt most people are willing to admit it was actually not such a great idea. There's this "prestige" of having an accelerator that I think is total bull.

I am a huge Uridium 2 fan and I never, ever found that the scene where you are at the dreadnought core and the explosion when you exit were faster. I actually remember thinking "wtf? Why does this still slow down on my 030@50?"

Fblit is great. For workbench/system friendly stuff. It makes no difference with hardware banging games like those on WHDload. Once you kill the system, Fblit is not working.
The problem with blitter waits is not that you are not supposed to wait. The problem is that if you don't have them, and you don't wait, the CPU goes too fast and everything goes to shit. You are being confused in thinking they are a bad thing, they are actually there to make the game work.

i hear you. We are all guilty of it. I got this Vampire 2 yesterday, and the Furia is back in there already, I must be trying to over compensate for something

The chances are, we are all numb to it. When running Frontier yesterday, i thought, "my god, was a stock A600 really this slow?", and i must have forgotten, that, like you, i have been using a juiced Amiga for that long, how bad the stock performance really is. its dire. TBH, i have found that by far the biggest effect on gaming performance WHDLoad wise anyway, comes from the OS. I had OS3.9 on there, and games where visibly slower, not by much, the core part in the Uridium dreadnought really slowed down when all those sprites appeared, and i found that going back to WB3.1 was far better, using a far smaller foot print, and giving slightly better performance in games. I think the confusion comes from frame rate and speed. Are games faster? no. they are not, they are capped at 30fps, but, if they have more horespower, they can render more frames, and it appears smoother, so it's probably more accurate to say, "an accelerator doesn't usually make the game faster, as the fps are usually capped, it does however make the game smoother, as a by product of that extra speed is more rendered images".


If i have been a dick, and mouthed on here, then i am sorry. Sometimes this place get soooo confrontational, it winds me up is all.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

I think the confusion comes from frame rate and speed. Are games faster? no. they are not, they are capped at 30fps, but, if they have more horespower, they can render more frames, and it appears smoother

PAL mode is 50 frames per second and NTSC is 60 frames per second. The typical Amiga 2D platformer games do maximum framerates all the time with a 7 MHz 68000 and using the blitter in parallel. There just cannot be more frames rendered in this type of games, this is just not how typical Amiga games works. Now in order to achieve this speed the CPU has to work in parallel to the blitter. The CPU starts a blitjob and goes on drawing some graphics object, updating copper lists, sprite positions, whatever. After a while it will start the next blitjob ASSUMING that the blitter is finished by now. This logic breaks with faster CPUs and the blitter remaining the same speed over all Amiga generations. The CPU is done with ist work much earlier and starts the next blitjob before the preceding one is finished which obviously leads to graphics glitches.

In order to fix this blitter waits are introduced into the WHDload slaves. This modifies the above sequence to "start 1st blitjob, draw some graphics object with the CPU, update copper lists, update sprite positions, do whatever, WAIT FOR BLITTER, start next blitjob."

This is, of course, slower than the original but it works well on faster CPUs and slower on vanilla Amigas. And suddenly you start to believe you NEED acceleration for the full framerate.

Another effect in WHDload is that it adds all types of interrupt vector code that also slows down the execution to slower than original. Again this creates the illusion of needing acceleration to enjoy the full framerate. Of course, as stated several times before, this is not true for all Amiga games but for the vast majority. To me games never were that important which is why I always went for acceleration and still believe the faster, the better...

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by grond

PAL mode is 50 frames per second and NTSC is 60 frames per second. The typical Amiga 2D platformer games do maximum framerates all the time with a 7 MHz 68000 and using the blitter in parallel. There just cannot be more frames rendered in this type of games, this is just not how typical Amiga games works. Now in order to achieve this speed the CPU has to work in parallel to the blitter. The CPU starts a blitjob and goes on drawing some graphics object, updating copper lists, sprite positions, whatever. After a while it will start the next blitjob ASSUMING that the blitter is finished by now. This logic breaks with faster CPUs. The next blitjob gets started before the preceding one is finished. In order to fix this blitter waits are introduced into the WHDload slaves. It modifies the above sequence to start 1st blitjob, draw some graphics object with the CPU, update copper lists, update sprite positions, do whatever, WAIT FOR BLITTER, start next blitjob. This is, of course, slower than the original but it works well on faster CPUs and slower on vanilla Amigas. And suddenly you start to believe you NEED acceleration for the full framerate. Another effect in WHDload is that it adds all types of interrupt vector code that also slows down the execution to slower than original. Again this creates the illusion of needing acceleration to enjoy the full framerate. Of course, as stated several times before, this is not true for all Amiga games but for the vast majority. To me games never were that important which is why I always went for acceleration and still believe the faster, the better...

yeah Grond, you're right of course, i guess its the games i play, not a huge fan of platformers, but flight sims and 3D FPS, Nemac IV, AB3D, Breathless etc. all show a massive jump in performance, as do vector graphics stuff, like ELITE. I did concede that for 90% of games, it makes no nevermind at all, i guess i just like playing the other 10%

[kolla]

Yeah, nobody cares about 90% of the games, as they are somewhere between mediocre and meh.

[th4t1guy]

For what it's worth, I've found that overall, WHDload games tend to run better on my a4000 than they do my cd32. That may just be because of more/faster memory though.

In regards to Elite 2, I saw a huge difference running it on an 040. And even though I have fond memories of it, at this point I would rather play FFED3D on the PC.

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by Akira

When I play Zool 2 on my accelerated Amiga using WHDLoad, the performance is worse than playing it on my stock CD32.

Originally Posted by EzdineG

Is there anything that can be done with the slave?

I like the game, but can't stand playing it in WHDLoad on my 600/1200. Is the only solution to load it from floppy?

Originally Posted by Akira

As i said before I think it is related to blitter waits. There is no solution so far. Reworking this slave to fix that, I've been told, would be a royal pain in the ass.

I think there may be a relatively simple solution that shouldn't involve reworking the Zool 2 slave. It involves the patch supporting a tooltype that disables the blitterwaits, which hopefully would prevent people experiencing slowdowns on slower machines (and not create any other problems in the process!). I remember Jeff doing this several years back in a slave update for Shadow of the Beast. Just a thought.....

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by DrBong

which hopefully would prevent people experiencing slowdowns on slower machines (

As I said I am a taling a bit out of my ass, not sure if it is blitterwaits, I think jotd said the problem is more complex, because I am getting massive slowdowns on my 030@50 too on that particular game.

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by Akira

As I said I am a taling a bit out of my ass, not sure if it is blitterwaits, I think jotd said the problem is more complex, because I am getting massive slowdowns on my 030@50 too on that particular game.

Well, the readme for the Zool 2 patch does say that several blitterwaits were inserted......so I'm guessing it's at least part of the problem. Obviously, it'd be good to hear a technical explanation from Jeff, Ian or one of the other patchers here as to what the cause is.

Unfortunately, in your case, you have the added problem of your Microbotics 030 card possessing more systemic problems with WHDLoad on your A1200 set-up. That much was clear from at least one long thread that I remember, where none of the many troubleshooting tips suggested did anything to remedy the unusual problems you were having with various WHDLoad patches. It would be nice to know what the cause is one day, though, if you or someone else is game enough to send Bert that Microbotics 030 card so he can troubleshoot it first-hand.

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

.....people have said that accelerators make no difference to gaming, well i like playing polygon heavy flight sims, and FPS games, and it makes a HUGE difference, even on normal 2D games it does make a difference. Uridium for example, plays more or less at the same speed unaccelerated, but the end part of each level, where you destroy the core, is far more frenetic and smoother, and dare i say it, more fun to play.

BTW that probably has very little to do with having an accelerator. Graftgold included something called "mayhem mode" at the end of levels in Uridium 2, as well as other graphical enhancements if the game detected the presence of an AGA chipset. More sound FX and reduced loading off floppy were other benefits to be had if extra memory (>1MB) was detected too. Quite a few mag reviews mentioned the AGA enhancements and it's all detailed in the game manual on HOL if you wanna read it for yourself.

http://hol.abime.net/1821/manual

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by DrBong

Unfortunately, in your case, you have the added problem of your Microbotics 030 card possessing more systemic problems with WHDLoad on your A1200 set-up.

UGH tell me about it. I hate that card. but I get the same results on an ACA620.

if you or someone else is game enough to send Bert that Microbotics 030 card so he can troubleshoot it first-hand.

I already offered to lend my card to him but I never got any response, not sure if anyone is interested in giving it a look. I will try to recap it (even if I was told this makes no difference) and then shoot him a mail to see if he wants to take a look. As long as I get it back I don't mind!

But now we went off-topic :P

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by DrBong

BTW that probably has very little to do with having an accelerator. Graftgold included something called "mayhem mode" at the end of levels in Uridium 2, as well as other graphical enhancements if the game detected the presence of an AGA chipset. More sound FX and reduced loading off floppy were other benefits to be had if extra memory (>1MB) was detected too. Quite a few mag reviews mentioned the AGA enhancements and it's all detailed in the game manual on HOL if you wanna read it for yourself.

http://hol.abime.net/1821/manual

yeah Dr. i knew all this, i remember years ago playing it for the first time with 2Mb, and thinking something had exploded in the room.

thanks anyway

[DrBong]

@Toryglen-boy
No worries, I wasn't aware of it myself TBH. Your original comment about Uridium 2 benefiting from accelerators just got me curious, and my HOL curiosity simply compelled me to check it out! Besides, I really didn't have a choice in the matter when I couldn't find anything about it in another thread on games that utilise extra memory. Reminds me, I must remember to update the HOL entry for Uridium 2 with the info. I did find in the manual. Anyway, carry on and enjoy this great little Amiga forum that we have here......

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=65574

[sean_sk]

Besides vector games, one game that I play a lot that really benefits from the Vampire is Civilization. Map generation times are cut down dramatically as well as CPU player move times. Even with the ACA620, wait times are painful.

@Toryglen-boy, you mentioned that you put the Furia back into your A600. What was the reason for doing that? How is it's stability and compatibility with software? Does it generate a lot of heat? I already have an ACA620 but was thinking of getting the Furia if I can't sort out my Vampire woes.

I received my Vampire 600 a few days back and am using it solely with ECS. I'm not using the HDMI out at all. I have been really disappointed with the compatibility. Perhaps I didn't do my homework properly or maybe I didn't know what to expect or I got it for all the wrong reasons but, while the speed is great, compatibility is supremely crap. I don't know enough about it to know for sure why, could it be the 68080 core or is it the speed?

With the Vampire there seems to be a lot of emphasis placed on speed and using this card with emulators and PC ported 3D games, and WHDLoad, but very little on general overall stability and compatibility, in other words, generally little emphasis placed on it actually acting like an Amiga. Maybe I'm wrong and someone can correct me on this.

I don't always want to use WHDLoad. I have a collection of retail floppy disks games which I actually like to use instead, cause I love floppies, they're cool! (I use my flux backup copies so I don't have to use the originals.) But, compatibility wise, most of them have been rendered useless, because of the Vampire. There are problems galore with them. Even in WHDLoad 18.3 there are problems with games.

I don't know a great deal about how I can fix this sort of stuff, so perhaps someone can offer some advice. Could some of the problems be solved if the Apollo guys offered a variety of cores such as 608020, 030, 040 etc at various speeds? I'm here to learn, so please be kind.

[grond]

@sean_skroht:

Try booting to early-startup, select boot without caches, boot your floppy game.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by sean_skroht

I received my Vampire 600 a few days back and am using it solely with ECS. I'm not using the HDMI out at all. I have been really disappointed with the compatibility. Perhaps I didn't do my homework properly or maybe I didn't know what to expect

I'm sorry to say that this is probably true.
Don't have to blame yourself completely for it either, I think there's a lot of ILL advice in Amiga boards right now, recommending people to get a Vampire as the end-all-be-all Amiga accessory/accelerator. I've seen people posting here saying "hey I just got an Amiga again, what should I do with it?' and people recklessly replying "you MUST get a Vampire". Before recommending that you need to know what the user wants to do with the computer! And disgruntled Vampire users are not a good thing for the Vampire team, which I really want to be successful with this development, so it's a vicious circle.

So yeah it seems you are a victim of this, from the use you say you give to the machine, the Vampire is just not the right product.
But now that you have one, it will probably be a good thing to stick with in the long run, because it is a work in progress, and since the core is software-reproduced, you can get updates, so it will only get better. Incompatibilities are for many reasons, but they will hopefully get sorted out in the future with further Core updates. So stick to it.

You even say you like using floppies (you crazy? ), so my suggestion would be to get an alternate machine that you optimize for this use. I have found that, for playing games and especially using any (old) floppies, an A500 setup with minor expansions would be the best. I'm really enjoying my A500 setup now (never liked the A500) which only has some extra RAM (2MB total), ECS Agnus and a Gotek floppy emulator. For gaming it's great, it basically plays everything I throw at it in a floppy disk or image, especially the super old stuff my Amiga 600 never played well with.

[sean_sk]

Thanks Akira for that advice and reassurance. Yeah I will stick with it and see how it all goes. While I don't have an A500 I do have an A1200 with an ACA1221 and it's been fantastic for compatibility etc so that's my go-too machine for everything else.
I get the general impression with hardware such as this, that it's generally not possible to have speed and compatibility together, that usually it's one or the other. So I may have to change my thinking in this regard, but as you say, things will improve as time goes by.

Originally Posted by grond

@sean_skroht:

Try booting to early-startup, select boot without caches, boot your floppy game.

Thanks grond for that. Yeah tried it, but unfortunately in some circumstances it made things worse. For example, Lotus 2 retails disk boots fine with cache on, albeit when you play it, there are graphical glitches. But when cache is disabled, the machine crashes shortly after booting from the disk.

[Sinphaltimus]

I think I'm going to make it a casual goal of mine to test every game/app that I can given what little spare time I have for such things and document it in regards to Vampire II.

One thing I'm going to miss, rom switching. Without the VII I can switch between 1.2 and 3.1. So if a have causes issue in 3.1 I just switch over. I every if at least dine of the incompatibility is due to this. Would be nice to have this as a feature for the VII. As an overzealous vampire purchase, I'll give credit where credit is due, Akira has warned me months ago about being disappointed due to incompatibilities that are to be expected with the VII.

I'm already considering an Armiga just for gaming. Especially now that they support ecs and aga.

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by sean_skroht

Besides vector games, one game that I play a lot that really benefits from the Vampire is Civilization. Map generation times are cut down dramatically as well as CPU player move times. Even with the ACA620, wait times are painful.

@Toryglen-boy, you mentioned that you put the Furia back into your A600. What was the reason for doing that? How is it's stability and compatibility with software? Does it generate a lot of heat? I already have an ACA620 but was thinking of getting the Furia if I can't sort out my Vampire woes.

I received my Vampire 600 a few days back and am using it solely with ECS. I'm not using the HDMI out at all. I have been really disappointed with the compatibility. Perhaps I didn't do my homework properly or maybe I didn't know what to expect or I got it for all the wrong reasons but, while the speed is great, compatibility is supremely crap. I don't know enough about it to know for sure why, could it be the 68080 core or is it the speed?

With the Vampire there seems to be a lot of emphasis placed on speed and using this card with emulators and PC ported 3D games, and WHDLoad, but very little on general overall stability and compatibility, in other words, generally little emphasis placed on it actually acting like an Amiga. Maybe I'm wrong and someone can correct me on this.

I don't always want to use WHDLoad. I have a collection of retail floppy disks games which I actually like to use instead, cause I love floppies, they're cool! (I use my flux backup copies so I don't have to use the originals.) But, compatibility wise, most of them have been rendered useless, because of the Vampire. There are problems galore with them. Even in WHDLoad 18.3 there are problems with games.

I don't know a great deal about how I can fix this sort of stuff, so perhaps someone can offer some advice. Could some of the problems be solved if the Apollo guys offered a variety of cores such as 608020, 030, 040 etc at various speeds? I'm here to learn, so please be kind.

Hi Sean

The main reason, was the same as yours. I have had the V2 about a week, and had nothing but grief. Its like a Ferrari, it goes like a rocket ship, but it needs constant adjustment, and checking, and noodling around with it, and finally you get to take it for a spin, and it works, but then something else needs adjusting etc. The Furia is like an old Toyota Corrolla, its not as fast, or as feature rich, but you know it's gonna get you there in the end. I have found several issues around compatibility, several emulators now, just dont work, and several games on WHDLoad dont work, and when i say several ,i mean, about 3/10 just wont have it.

The other 2 things, dare i say it, are build quality and customer service. Maybe its assumed that you have some knowledge of these things, but alot of people dont, my V2 arrived in a box, with no instructions, like everyone elses, but only 1 plastic mounting post, i had to get creative and make one from a rawlplug. The socket that clips over the CPU is woeful, and i mean woeful, even when it's on uber tight, you can still move it from side to side and hear metal grind on metal, and in the last few days the A600 has been in bits, because most of my time has been spent mounting, and re-mounting this thing over and over, which means stripping the entire thing down, and taking the mobo out, and even when i have the V2 bolted down on there, as hard as i can, it seems to last a while, and then needs remounting. Customer service to, is awful, i know these guys are not Amazon, and dont have a huge customer service dpt. i get that, but trying to get help, involves going onto the IRC channel for Apollo, and just shouting out questions, 9/10 times the answer will come from OTHER V2 owners instead of the staff, they say, "we are too busy on working on getting orders out to talk", and i understand that also, but its not great, and they appear to have thrown the baby out with the bath water. But seriously, the build quality on the socket on the V2 is shocking, on the Furia its a far tighter fit, and it SNAPS on there, and once its on, it's not coming off. In all the time i have had the Furia, i have never had to reseat it once, i have never had any incompatibility issues etc. dont get me wrong, I had some issues at the start, namely the Furia being really picky about what CF card it will use, and FFS. But once i got a good Sandisk card, and went with PFS3, those issues all went away, but to reiterate, the socket on the Furia is like Japanese carpentry, uber precise and the best fit possible. The socket on the V2 is like someone nailed some wood together with bent nails and a brick

So, what now? well, i now have an issue with my A600, i must have done something to the board with constantly removing it, but now workbench says i only have 200K of chip RAM, and thats before WB loads, and i get a yellow screen on bootup, if i put the A604n in there. Putting the V2 in there gives me 1Mb of chip ram, but this is probably an auto config thing. Am i disappointed in how fast it is? yes and no, the speed is there, but it's not usable, at least, on what i want it to work on.

I am a keen astrophotographer, and people always ask me, "what's the best telescope to get?", my answer is always, "its not the biggest one you can afford, its the one you will use the most", and the same applies here. If i knew all this would i have ordered a V2, no. I wouldn't because the reality is, you have to run your Amiga with the top casing unsecured, so you constantly have access to the guts of, and that for me is no good. I have learned this, its great to showcase what the Amiga can do etc, but as a usable product, it falls very far behind other clip on accelerators.

DISCLAIMER : Yes, i know yours works fine, yes, i know you haven't had to reseat yours, yes, i know you know what your on about, yes, you can think i am dumb because yours work.

[sean_sk]

And therein lies my problem: I've never owned a Ferrari.

Seriously though, it would be nice if the Vampire team provided a number of different downloadable cores that a user could flash to their card depending on their usage requirements. If you werent into all that Apple Mac emulation stuff, PC game ports, playing MP3's and general benchmark bragging rights, but you still wanted a little extra speed while retaining excellent compatibility, why not offer a core that offers...say.... a 68020 at 25 or 50mHz. And have the same for 68030, 040 and so on.

Someone might say, why not get an actual Motorola based acceleration card? Well I already have one but I was looking for a little extra kick for a few games and applications. And really, at the end of the day, real Motorola CPU's are getting harder to get and they wont last forever. I see FPGA's as an excellent opportunity to continue the legacy. I'm all for developing the technology further and sometimes having to cater to backwards compatibility can stunt progress, so why not give users a choice?