3D In Motion!

I had some time off between cooking for the family x-mas dinner and had a look at Warp3D. I had looked at it before and back then it just crashed the system.

This time around I noticed that the ramlib_ppc task was the culprit. So I googled around and found that it was a common problem within WarpOS/Warp3D. The stack is just too small.

So I upped the stack size for ramlib_ppc and installed a 68k patch for ramlib itself and now the sonnet library hanged on a DSI when opening Warp3DPPC.library. Debugging showed that this was because Warp3DPPC.library was loaded into FAST memory. Memory the PPC on the sonnet card cannot reach.

So the InitSonnet program was adjusted to pre-load all the Warp3D libraries to the memory of the Sonnet and below is the result (e.g. 75 FPS on the Warp3D gears program).

On a side note: I had ordered multiple Sonnet cards from the US for $25 USD dollar a piece on http://resale.headgap.com/. Too bad they now removed it from their web shop without replying to me. I guess they didn't had it in stock anyway...

Happy New Year :-)

Picture(s) of the Day: Sonnet goes 3D

The pictures aren't very good, but hey... :-)

Here's the Sonnet running gearsppc.exe from the warp3d demo folder.

Here's a screenshot with my camera from a timedemo of 640x480

And here's 800x600. These are exactly the same results as the highest FPS on http://www.amigaspeed.de.vu/ indicating maybe there is a limit? 1024x768 sadly crashed.

Here a very bad picture of the test version of WipeOut. Couldn't get full screen... Something about not having the right modes.

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays from the SonnetAmiga Team!

As the year closes it's time to show a clip about the current state of the library. ;-)

The fade in the sound is the monitor switching resolutions (it's a monitor with build-in speakers). As people might remember, this is 2 out of 3 of my personal goals done.

See you all in the next year! The new year resolutions are

*) Warp3D support
*) WarpDT support (Goal 3)
*) A4000D non black mediator mod
*) A4000D black mediator support
*) A1200 TX/SX support.

Hopefully Santa has some secret stash of Sonnets somewhere.... ;-)

Picture of the Day: DualPPC

Here's a picture of the workbench of my A1200 with a TX mediator and a BlizzardPPC:

More coming soon.

Quake II

While doing my weekly round on the Amiga forums, the following thread on the English Amiga Board caught my eye:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=74679&highlight=quake2

It's about optimizing and playing with the open source part of the Quake 2 engine.  Somewhere halfway in the thread (and still in 2014, I think) there are WarpOS compiled binaries which begged to be tested on the Sonnet.

Of course, as far as I understand the comments made in the thread, the code is far from optimized. And that it wouldn't be as fast as with Warp3D (around 26 FPS at 640x480 on a 233 MHz 604e - with Voodoo3 - see http://www.alinea-computer.de/amigaspeed/q***e2.html)

Here is a video with the Sonnet running Quake 2 on a Radeon without Warp3D:

As it can be briefly seen, a speed of 14 FPS is reached with 640x480 using the software renderer. Which is about 4 times slower per MHz as the 604e with Warp3D. So I guess the next step is to get Warp3D going for the Sonnet. That way other games like WipeOut will become available for the Sonnet too (and along with a nice speed increase on some other games).

As a side note. You can see that the A3000UX is sporting 400+ MB of memory. This is actually 64 FAST ram, around 200MB Video RAM and 128MB Sonnet RAM. The latter two being available to the PPC at (almost) full speed. This is about as much as we can cram reliable in the 512MB Zorro-III window of the mediator without further MMU tricks. With a Voodoo this would be 16MB Video RAM (max) and 256MB Sonnet RAM (max) as the start of the Sonnet memory must be on a boundary of a power of 2 so either 512MB which cannot be done with the current code (it clashes with the video ram) or 256MB.

Until next time.