Saturday, March 12, 2016

PPC Demos on the Sonnet

I was looking to get some demos running on the sonnet and a posting on EAB came in very handy (see it here: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=71650). It listed some demos which are suppose to work on CSPPC/Voodoo3. So I picked the very top one and did a small & quick patch to the hunk header and names and here is the result:


Compare this to a CSPPC on 366MHz and G-Rex/Voodoo3 (Pardon the shaking, it is not mine ;-))


I know it is a bit difficult to read so here are the FPS:

x - CSPPC 366 MHz - Sonnet 500 MHz
1 -             33              -              46
2 -             22              -              32
3 -             20              -              38
4 -             18              -              30
5 -             21              -              30
6 -             17              -              29
7 -             48              -              50
8 -             18              -              31
9 -             22              -              42

Monday, March 7, 2016

Why settle for real, if you can have emulation?

The (working) programs and games in the previous movies/pictures had in common that they mostly consist of 1 running PPC task. The ones with more running tasks would freeze up after a while (main task got stuck in wait) or lost sound (sound task got stuck in wait).

A lot of debugging time went into this and a race condition was found during the messaging between the 2 CPUs.

With the fix, a whole of various emulators became stable to work with. So also with the inspiration I got from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqnVlRIiPVJsU2SqsfVwV3w here's a short video with different emulators.



1) AmiGeneratorT / Mortal Kombat II
2) DarcNes / Double Dragon
3) AmiGeneratorT / Sonic
4) WarpScummVM / DOTT
5) MAME / 88Games
6) UAEWOS / AIBB on LSD101 disk
7) WarpSNES / SuperMario World.

Some stuff is not optimized yet. ScummVM is accessing a lot of FAST memory still which maybe can avoided as each access is a context switch. Sound with Double Dragon is a bit weird in the menus, but I have seen this on a BPPC too.

Sorry for such a bland WB, I forgot to place my WB picture back after tests with WarpDT (no, not working yet). Also I really should install a silent fan into that A3000.

And see if you can spot the growling cat during the movie ;-)