Quake 3 on the Sonnet

Lately, there has been a resurgence of porting of games to WarpOS and Quake 3 is one of them. This port was done by CowCat. Still in alpha, but it definitely has potential.

Sadly, this phone has a worse camera than my previous one. Also, playing with the keyboard which was behind the camera was a tad difficult, hence the weird walking sometimes :-)

Dabbling with Warp3D..

Just a teaser. I've been converting some OS4 and/or 68K Warp3D stuff to OS3 and PPC. Here some first results.

I haden't posted in a while....so... :-)

Hope to show you some more the coming weeks. Or not... who knows...

Testing ReWarp on an Amiga X5000

Lately, I've seen multiple posting regarding ReWarp and why the development has stopped. The truth is that it all seems to work fine, except with Warp3D. Also, some sound drivers give problems on the Sam machines, but the main problem is 3D.

I am at the moment not sure if this is because of the backwards compatibility of Warp3D, of that ReWarp is to blame. With Wazp3D everything seems ok, albeit slow.

In the video you will witness two crashes. One in the lowlevel.library (used to be much more 6 months ago, but I guess lowlevel.library has improved in the meanwhile) and one in the wazp3d.library.. The original WarpOS warp3d driver (warp3dppc.library) actually redirects all calls to warp3d.library (in this case a renamed wazp3d.library). Not sure if the crash is due to ReWarp or Wazp3D.

Without further ado, here is the video:

Like stated in the video, any help appreciated. Please redirect your comments to the git issue trackers:

https://github.com/Sakura-IT/ReWarp

and

https://github.com/Sakura-IT/ReWarp3DPPC

Thanks!

Further developments...

Now with sound :-)

Some glitches here and there and a annoying mouse pointer in the way, but it's getting there. I also notice I need to silence my A3000UX PSU one of these days.

Some developments....

There has been a little movement on the WarpOS front as of late. Cowcat, who did a great job the last few years on Quake2 and BlitzQuake now tried his hands on Hexen II.

Here is the result:

Sound needs an overhaul and I guess I need a better camera, but for a first beta is it really cool. Well done!

SIMD for classic Amigas

As you all of course know by now, Sonnet cards are rather hard to be found. Even more rare is to find a Sonnet Crescendo 7200 G4. There were a few for sale when I started this project over 2 years ago, but they wouldn't ship to Europe. Since then, it has dried up, even for the G3s, on the various market sites.

A good friend of mine happened to have bought one....maybe 6 months ago. He lives in Germany. While I was in the neighborhood I could setup and test the G4 card. The computer used was a busted up A3000 with a Mediator and a Voodoo3. Also in the picture you can see a CSPPC:

The CSPPC makes it impossible to close the A3000, as the cooler of the 060 was too high. So we set up the system in a very unconventional way :-) It was running a bare OS3.1. 

As the biggest difference between G3 and G4 is AltiVec (I'm not certain about number of pipelines and FPU speed) which is a so called SIMD instruction set which speeds up certain calculations, the first program run was the dnetc program. It supports AltiVec, or so I thought:

As you can see in the above picture, no speedup or AltiVec cores chosen. This was due to two issues. One, the sonnet.library needs to activate the AltiVec stuff when available. And two, dnetc for WarpOS does not have AltiVec compiled in it. So after a bit of work I added AltiVec support to sonnet.library:

Here you can see my system with the G4 card. GetInfo recognizes the card correctly. In the window on the left you see part of the AltiVec support in sonnet.library. It's the loading of the various AltiVec registers after a task switch (when AltiVec is detected (PSL_VEC)).

As AltiVec programs for the classic Amiga are even more rare (WarpOS does not support it and there are 0 (zero) programs which use it), I wrote a small program to test if it works and that seems ok.

Next step would maybe be to port some MPEG-1 player. Or maybe you guys have some AltiVec sources lying around I could test? Much appreciated :-)