Monday, May 23, 2016

Some more games! (ReWarp)



Quake2 WarpOS running at 800x600:



WipeOut2097 running. It has black boxes for shadows. Maybe some Warp3D setting:


At this stage, it has become apparent that 2 things can hamper your experience regarding ReWarp:

Stack. If you encounter a DSI it is most likely stack related. WarpOS programs seem to need a lot.
Warp3D: I recommend Wazp3D to check if it runs in software and patchWarp3D from Aminet if your Amiga freezes (with no GR).

The original warposemu has documentation stating what works and what doesn't. Next time we'll go through the 'does-not-work' list.

Later!

Sunday, May 22, 2016

WarpOS demos running on the Sam440 under OS4.1

Here's an example of a demo which will not run under the old wrapper on the Sam440.

Sadly the screen was a bit tilted so it's a bit dark, but that's filming an LCD screen for ya....




In the mean time, more and more software is starting to run. WipeOut still lacks sound, but I'm looking into that.

Enjoy.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Slow progress...

Progress on the ReWarp project has been slow but steady.

Most of the functions are in with only a few important ones missing (like WaitTime which is used by WipeOut). Also no FPU alignment exception code has been added. Last night, the code for CreateTaskPPC was added and the last of the tools from WarpOS (Multitasking) now finally worked.

So how about games? In the previous posting we had a movie of a Sam440 running QuakeWOS. Warp3D games crashed or gave strange output. They worked on wazp3d, but very slow.

Then (again)  thanks to Alain Thellier I was pointed to a patch program on Aminet (http://aminet.net/driver/video/PatchWarp3D.lha) which solved a bunch of problems.

So here is glQuakeWOS running on 800x600 on a Sam440 666MHz with a Radeon 9200:



This is a good first step regarding Warp3D games. Mileage will vary depending on the video card used.

Tomorrow a posting regarding some stuff that didn't work with the old library but is now working with ReWarp. Until then!

Saturday, May 14, 2016

And now for something completely differemt...

Or is it more of the same? Anyway, I've been keeping myself busy with the re-implementation of the WarpOS emulation for AmigaOS4.

The last version of the original implementation is from 2009 and does not support (directly) the newer machines like X1000 and Sam460. Which means that popular games WarpOS games like WipeOut2097 can not be played under OS4.1FE.

During the Neuss show, Timothy de Groote from Hyperion had asked me, with my experience with WarpOS, if I could have a look at it. At the time, the sonnet library was still missing key features and I told him that I needed to implement those first. With the Aminet release of the sonnet library, that was accomplished.

Now I don't own any of the machines on which the original did not work. I have a very old AmigaOne XE 800MHz G4 machine and an even older A4000T with CyberstormPPC, both running OS4.1. Somehow, the A4000T is faster in the reboot so I started the project there (and I needed a lot of reboots in the early start-up of the project). Not having the machines became an obstacle after a few weeks of programming so Timothy kindly provided me with a Sam440 machine which I could borrow for development.

As the chip in the Sam440 is almost the same as in the 460 (the core of the AMCC440 and AMCC460 is both PPC440), I''m confident that anything running on the Sam440 should be running on the Sam460. The X1000 has the PA6T chip which is very much compatible with the older (G2-G3-G4-G5) types of PowerPC so anything running on the AmigaOne XE and my A4000 should also be running on the X1000.

The project is still in the early stages, but here's a move of running Quake on the Sam440:




Only 15% of the total functions of WarpOS have been implemented, but these are the most used/important ones so a lot of stuff should already work. Warp3D is a bit problematic as there seem to be a bit of incompatibilities between V4 and V5 of Warp3D. I have to look into that in the future.