Polygon game speeds

[Echo]

Not a problem as such, but this seemed the most appropriate area.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has got Stunt Car Racer to run at a fluid framerate (I'm talking 60fps, a real A500 managed 8-10, if that). My real A1200 smoothens the game out a little, so there's no reason why UAE and a fast PC processor can't smooth it even further.

A good example I can mention is Elite 2 - Frontier. This runs about 10 times the framerate on UAE compared to my real A1200 030@50mhz. The difference is amazing when taking off from outdoor bases, on full detail. The A1200 manages maybe 5fps, and UAE is fluid at easily 50fps.

Going back to SCR, I've tried 68040 and many other combinations, but can't seem to get it running any more fluid than my real A1200. Surely it must be possible, CPU speed seems to make huge differences in all polygon games. Driller is another example.

If anyone has any other polygon games that run shockingly faster on UAE, let me know - I'd love to check them out!

[ervin]

G'day.

Many polygon games can be made to run faster, but the game itself speeds up as well. Cybercon 3 is a good example - crank up the cpu speed and the game becomes unplayable. As does Damocles. Damn. Bugger. etc. Same with the Freescape games like total eclipse etc.

Fighter Bomber can be made SMOOOOTH with the right settings, and at the right game speed. I loved that game in the old days, and now it is significantly better thru emulation. Give it a spin, try some tweaks - it's awesome.

The Sentinel can be made much better too, and (I think) still runs at the right game speed - tough to tell, as the only indicator of game speed is how fast the sentinel itself turns.

Zeewolf (and I assume it's sequel) can be made very smooth and still run at the same game speed. Maybe Virus falls into this category as well, not sure yet.

Stunt car racer appears to be locked to cpu cycles or something... bit of a shame, as it's probably still the best racing game around.
I believe formula 1 grand prix suffered the same fate - but this is fixable by using that patch thingie that's been around for years.

Believe me, I've tried everything on stunt car racer, and nothing worked to make it smoother without problems. Making WinUAE run at full speed (adjustable between cpu and chipset option selected and the slider all the way to the cpu side) introduces severe graphics problems... still a ripper of a game though. Even today, you can still feel the motion as you fly over a hump in the track and come down to land on the other end of the hump.

It's obvious that many Amiga 500 polygon games were written for the 7Mhz processor, and no timing was taken into account to allow faster processors to run the games correctly. Major bummer.

Anyway, the trick is to play with the Chipset "Immediate blitter" option, the CPU "Fastest possible, but maintain chipset timing", and the CPU "Adjustable between CPU and chipset" options. A whole new world opens up.

A1200 games like Breathless, Alien breed 3d (1 & 2), Genetic species (masterpiece) etc. can be made almost flawlessly smooth with the right tweaks, if it is A1200 stuff you want to play (of course, the PC you are playing WinUAE on will have to be pretty quick itself). And Quake - cripes that becomes awesome.

There are heaps of other A500 polygon games still to try out...

What I have found interesting is the number of racing games that can be improved by playing with the settings I mentioned above.

The original Outrun becomes unplayable as the game itself speeds up (not that it was ever really playable anyway - surely one of the most poorly programmed racing games on the amiga), but turbo outrun and outrun europa become much much better (not that outrun europa was ever a slouch anyway). Cisco Heat becomes well worth a spin, and power drift (tricky to tweak but worth it) becomes absolutely divine. SCI (chase hq 2) becomes fabulous too.

Lotus 3 (on the A500) was sloooow because of the way the tracks were calculated from that RECS system, but on WinUAE, with the right tweaks, it becomes smoooooth and an absolutely joy to play.

There are HEAPS of other games I have yet to try, but I hope this helps.

[Echo]

Some interesting pointers, thanks

Yeah the game pace is the problem I suppose. In Frontier's case, the game plays at the correct pace while drawing a load more frames per second. Driller on the other hand, as you said, is like a Porsche in a cardboard box

I tried out Breathless, but have to frameskip to get anything useful - Amiga was never that good at this genre sadly. As for Quake, you'd be mad to play it through UAE as opposed to native GLQuake

I think Stunt Car Racer seriously needs a remake, just for the ability to netplay people. What a game.

[ervin]

Just wondering - what sort of PC are you running WinUAE on?
Breathless can be tweaked very well, but you need a fast PC.
Switching on immediate blitter makes a HUGE difference for it.

You're right about Quake - it's just interesting to see it running so smoothly on an Amiga.

As for Stunt Car Racer - yes, I would happily go and BUY a remake of it, it was that good (listening, Geoff Crammond?)
I played it so much in the old days I knew the correct speeds for every single jump, and I could get through all 8 tracks. The game then made you go through all 8 tracks again with a super-powered car that accelerated so fast you had to totally rethink your speeds as you came to jumps. It was freaky. I couldn't get through the tracks in this mode.

Actually, games like f15 strike eagle 2, thunderhawk etc. should be a blast to play under winuae. I think those games were well programmed as far as different cpu speeds go...

Breathless runs PERFECTLY on my 800mhz athlon. Much faster than a 040 and I don't know how can it get any better on a faster system. Sound might be better but it's a general issue.

[ervin]

Yeah me too - breathless is as smooth as a baby's a*se on my PC, but then again I'm running an Athlon 2000XP .

[Shatterhand]

I remember F1GP was a lot smoother in an A1200, as I played it in my mate's A1200 once.

Now Power Drift... hmm, would it be worthy to tried it in a fast PC with WinUAE? Power Drift is one of my fav games ever (Probably the arcade game I most spent coins in my whole life), and I searched ages for a proper home version with no luck. The only PLAYABLE version was the Amstrad CPC one, yet it's ages away from the arcade one. All other versions are rubbish as hell (Including amiga version)

Now, about Stunt Car Race... he, it would be great if they could bring the game to the new millenium. More tracks, more cars, better AI, multiple cars in the track at the same time, and MULTIPLAYER. Yes.

The same can be said about 4D Sports Driving. (Which I think it's even better than Stunt Car Race)

[ervin]

Actually I think power drift on the amiga was pretty impressive considering the massive amount of huge sprites being shifted around. I used to play it for hours.

If you have a power drift adf, try this:
- chipset tab, set immediate blitter
- cpu tab, set adjustable between cpu and chipset to 1 (ie. slide all the way to the left to give highest priority to the cpu emulation).

Power drift will now be smoother than ever before!

Trivia alert!
If you finish all five tracks in a set in 1st place, you'll get to fly around another track in the plane from afterburner.

[Echo]

Originally posted by ervin
Just wondering - what sort of PC are you running WinUAE on?
Breathless can be tweaked very well, but you need a fast PC.
Switching on immediate blitter makes a HUGE difference for it.

I must be missing something, because I just gave it another try and it's running worse than a real A1200 / 030. Immediate blitter doesn't seem to improve things here. Running on an Athlon 1.4ghz. Could you attach your config for it please?

[BippyM]

CPU isn't always going to alter things.. what GFX card you got? remember on a PC polygons are shifted by a gpu...

[Sune Salminen]

Originally posted by Shatterhand
Now Power Drift... hmm, would it be worthy to tried it in a fast PC with WinUAE? Power Drift is one of my fav games ever (Probably the arcade game I most spent coins in my whole life), and I searched ages for a proper home version with no luck. The only PLAYABLE version was the Amstrad CPC one, yet it's ages away from the arcade one. All other versions are rubbish as hell (Including amiga version)

The Original arcade version of Power Drift is partially emulated (no screen tilting and some glitches, but fully playable) in the Finalburn emulator, and a driver is under way for MAME.

I recommend you use an analog joystick or a steering wheel!

See http://www.finalburn.com

[Galahad/FLT]

I released a long long time ago, Stunt Car Racer Turbo, whereby I sorted the game out for faster processors, on an A12oo, the game flies and is very smooth.

The reason why by default Stunt Car Racer will not operate any quicker on different processors is to do with the Serial Link up option. If you had an A5oo owner versus an A3ooo owner, and the game was tied to processor speed, the A3ooo owner would always win, so Geoff Crammond tied the speed down so no matter what machine its played on, the match will always be fair, and if that is still the case on WinUAE, then more power to Geoff's coding.

Seek out Stunt Car Racer Turbo, you will find it a little more enjoyable. I released it as an ADF, some other groups single filed it after.

Im quite sure someone with better internet knowlege here will either stick it in the zone or will have a link for it.

[Echo]

Originally posted by bippym
CPU isn't always going to alter things.. what GFX card you got? remember on a PC polygons are shifted by a gpu...

I assumed any old card could handle the display perfectly on WinUAE, the display is not particularly demanding by today's standards. Surely the whole interface is graphically driven in software anyway, excluding the OpenGL scaling feature of course.


Galahad: I will definately check that out, thanks for the pointer

Edit: Is this it?
"Stunt Car Racer - Speed Version (1988)(MicroStyle)[cr Enigma][t +2 Enigma]"

[trodas]

Technically spoken, the problem with polygon games speed that dont get better on better machines lying (in case of reall Amiga) in the blitter.
If you use blitter to draw polygons, things dont get faster on faster CPUs, since the blitter simply dont get any faster, only the setup and 3D calculations are faster, witch might speed-up the game a little, but not so much.

When you get more closely to the problem, then what limiting the blitter to fill the polygons faster is the number of pixels, what it have to fill to draw a anged polygon...
...the fillrate is simply terrible.

Luckily, clever guys find a solution and even made a half-working and then fully working patch.

To reduce the number of pixels, what the blitter have to fill, they draw a one (or even more rectangles) by CPU, so, the blitter filling then only the smaller gaps between the squares and the anged line.

The result is breathtaking.

While Stunt Car Racer orginally running at about 17fps on 060/50, using this patch kicked the framerate to not less that 50fps on decent 60/62

STR with this fix must FLY on any, decently fast, machine

[Galahad/FLT]

Is technically correct, in the case of SCR..... it only used the blitter for the load/save decode routines, it was otherwise entirely CPU driven.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally posted by Echo
I assumed any old card could handle the display perfectly on WinUAE, the display is not particularly demanding by today's standards. Surely the whole interface is graphically driven in software anyway, excluding the OpenGL scaling feature of course.


Galahad: I will definately check that out, thanks for the pointer

Edit: Is this it?
"Stunt Car Racer - Speed Version (1988)(MicroStyle)[cr Enigma][t +2 Enigma]"

Nope, not that one mate .

[Echo]

I've found it now, but it doesn't seem to speed up any more than the default game when comparing an A500 to A1200, or UAE.

However, I also found a hd install of Stunt Track(?) Racer by Codetapper, which features a turbo mode. Enabling turbo makes my A1200 run at speeds of the original '1200 enhanced' SCR, however running it on UAE really shifts it fast - something like 500% faster. But it's not ideal because it speeds up the whole game rather than draw more frames per second. It is very smooth, but you need reactions of a cheetah

[ervin]

echo, here is my A1200 config for playing breathless.
Hope it works for you!

[ervin]

Originally posted by bippym
CPU isn't always going to alter things.. what GFX card you got? remember on a PC polygons are shifted by a gpu...

Bippym, we are NOT talking about shifting PC polygons around! We are talking about shifting Amiga polygons around.

NO GPU REQUIRED!

If the video card can do a fast 16 bit display, it's fine for WinUAE.

Geez...

Are you sure you are logged in to the right forum?

[Echo]

Thanks Ervin. That config works really well, totally smooth!

I'm still baffled what setting is doing it though, I'm trying to replicate your settings into my favourite A1200 config and can't get it as smooth. The thing I noticed making the most difference though was the JIT settings. Not even sure what this is doing, but the cache appears to smooth out game framerates. It also helps in Xtreme Racing.

Maybe I'll just work from yours and change that to what my old one was.

Edit:
Wow, this config absolutely flies when I set up my Workbench config over it! Boots even faster, entering directories is literally like a ram disk. 64k megademos run excessively fast, I shall have to dig out the amazing TBL ones over the last few years. They were always spoiled a little by a low framerate.

I don't know what setting is causing this, but thanks again