Blood for WarpOS!

 Thanks to BSzili (on EAB) Blood from Monolith (in the form of nBlood) is now available to Amiga! Cowcat and I have taken up the task to port this to WarpOS. Below can you see a work-in-progress. Sorry for the bad quality. If it is finished probably somebody else will do a much better job :-)

It is running on my AA3000+ with a Mediator (I replaced the FireBird for development a bit) and a Radeon 9200 Pro card with a Apocalypse card (MPC7410 / 256MB).

The current showstopper for release is multiplayer. It works, but it slows down the game a lot (from the fps you see in this video to below 20 fps).

MIDI slows down a bit in heavy scenes and also window mode is sluggish, but those I don't consider real show-stoppers.

As you can see, FPS is not too shabby. This is on 640x480 with interpolation on and details on highest:

Playing with my new toys!

Bought myself some covid-comfort gifts a few months ago. First off the amazing AA3000+ made by Hese. It is a hybrid of two prototype Amigas. The AA3000 and the A3000+ meaning it has AGA and a DSP. For more info on the latter I point you to A1K.org.

Secondly, as I was toying with CAMD in the latest ScummVM sources (back then 2.2) and I needed something to actually test it (and was sold by some of the ScummVM plus MIDI movies on the internet). So I bought myself a Roland SC-55 MKII all the way from Japan. Finding a correct power supply took longer than expected, but the result is cool IMHO.

Further specs of this AA3000+ is a CSMK2 running on 55MHz, a Ragnarok PPC card running on 800MHz and some card that cannot be named with 128MB gfx RAM.

Shown are "Day of the Tentacle" and "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".

Return To Castle Wolfenstein....WarpOS style!

With the WarpOS gcc tool chain getting more and more mature and with CowCat doing his magic with it, more and more stuff is possible.

Here is a video of RTCW being played on an Amiga 4000 with Voodoo3 and a Harrier (Motorola PowerPlus III) based PMC card. Enjoy:

Also Smokin Guns has been ported. Maybe a video next time :-)

New Amiga driver for PCI network card....

Well, sort of. We are talking about the BigFoot Killer NIC here with a dedicated NPU for helping out with the network traffic to reduce latency and ping. It was advertised as giving you an edge to kill virtual people faster.

So why for the Amiga then? Well, the Network Processing Unit, or short NPU, is actually an MPC8343E PowerPC CPU running at 400MHz. The card also had 64MB DDR RAM on-board.

Here's a picture of the card with mega-awesomeness-superduper heat sink:

That NPU can be used to run WarpOS software when plugged into the Mediator:

This is a cheap alternative to the more expensive PPC accelerator cards. It only has 64MB on-board so don't expect running Quake III on it. Currently people are looking whether or not the on-board RAM can be upgraded by the means of modding.

Have fun!

Another member of the family

Over the years I have been trying to get a hold of other cards which could potentially function as a PPC PCI card in a classic Amiga with mediator. You have probably seen the PMC carrier picture from way back in 2016.

Thanks to the help of one person in particular (you know who you are) the Rapture card was identified as being able to run in a classic Amiga and added by me to the number of cards being supported. This was an easy one to add as it also has the MPC107 chip-set. The benefit it being a MPC7410 450MHz which made the search for a Sonnet G4 no longer needed.

That same person also looked into other chip-sets besides the MPC107 and pointed me to them and their documentation. It took a few weeks to program (effectively...I've been busy on and off on it for months) but I can now present the support for the Motorola Harrier chip-set.

I've been developing on a card with 256MB and a 450MHz MPC7410 and it seems faster than the Rapture. It also can be set-up without the help of VGA memory (so it can be run right after C:SetPatch).

See http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=1247533#post1247533 for more info and benchmarks.

The family becomes bigger and bigger. Below picture shows a carrier in the top left corner. The Rapture card in the bottom left corner. A sonnet on the right and in the middle the new supported card.

Happy hunting!

Developing for WarpOS

Of course it is fun to play with the old stuff on the Sonnet and the Rapture card. But how about new stuff?

The old GCC compiler for WarpOS (2.95.3) was hopelessly outdated and VBCC doesn't support C++ and most of the C sources out there need some adaptation to compile on VBCC.

Enter another project of mine: mos2wos. This stands for MorphOS to WarpOS and is a set of tools to develop for WarpOS on MorphOS machines. Now you can use the newer GCC binutils from MorphOS and what is even better, you can use GCC compilers version 4.4.5, 5.5.0 or 6.4.0 to produce WarpOS executables!

It took a few months to mature, but it is getting to a point that it is getting usable with a freshly compiled SDL library especially made for WarpOS and a very up-to-date C library (newlib 3.0) making porting even more easy!

How useful is it? Here are some examples compiled with version 0.8:

Little brother wants to play too!

Three years ago was the start of the development of the Sonnet PPC PCI card driver for the Amiga. It has been developed for the Mediator for the big box Amigas, the A4000(T) and A3000(T). The first few videos and pictures were showing quite simple programs like Cybermand and Voxelspace. But it was a start. Later Warp3D was made to work and the rest is history.

Over the years it was a big frustration that the little A1200 could not cope with the card. This, as I explained before, because of the bank switching needed in the A1200 mediator. Also, the address range used for the card which is automatically set by the Mediator was giving all kinds of problems

Over the past year, Elbox has been very supportive to get the library working on the A1200. Development on my side has been on and off due to other priorities.

The version of the pci.library went up from 11.0 to 13.5 to get to the point where the A1200 mediator could handle a PPC card.

Before I continue I have to say immediately that it still does not work correctly. But a lot of progress has been made. I guess we are at the same point in time like 3 years ago for A1200 support.

The below video is a PPC 7410 450MHz card with 256 MB of SDRAM running inside an Amiga 1200 with a Mediator TX running Voxelspace.

Simple stuff like this is working flawlessly, but at soon as stress is applied to the system, like with QuakeWOS, bus errors appear. Strangely enough, the crashes appear to be inside the AmigaOS.

Anyway, version 13.5 of the pci.library is still fresh and now we have a basis to further develop on. Stay tuned!

Power in Diversity

A while back, well actually June 2015 or around there, I should a picture of a PMC2PCI card. Since then I have been scouring the Internet for suitable PMC cards. Tried a bunch of them, but none of them worked.

Then I got some help from an expert in PMC cards and he delivered :-)

Below is a Force PowerPMC-250 card with a 450 MHz MPC7410 (G4) card with 256MB SDRAM on-board:

With a PMC to PCI carrier card it was added to my A3000UX and here is the first result after updating the driver:

The card is regarding power consumption on the edge of what the A3000D can handle. The Amiga has to warm up for a couple of minutes before the PPC card becomes stable. It is not the PPC which is crashing, but the 68K when fetching/running code from the PPC memory. But as said, after a while it becomes stable. I guess I need to upgrade my PSU.

I also wish to thank Elbox for their speedy support in updating their pci.library to support these kind of cards!

Hopefully, we can ramp up with faster cards in the near future.

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 :-)

Lies, damned lies and statistics

Added functionality to the sonnet.library which tracks CPU usage (time running), busy time (time not waiting) and activity (time.... I forgot, but the tooltips of WarpStat are very handy :-)

I also noticed that people are having a hard time to install the Sonnet card. (The few people having one). I actually got a copy from a Workbench of someone and my Sonnet refuses to work with that system disk. Not sure what the problem is yet... Seems like the set P96 screen modes are messing with the system. Have to look further into it.

Next post will be probably about all the pitfalls of installation :-)

Blue in the face!

As said in the previous post, the last update made it possible for more demos to run. Here's one from that OTHER ppc solution back in the days: PowerUP from Phase 5.

The demo called Glare is from the widely known PPC demo group Mad Wizards. The video doesn't handle lighting perfectly (some of it is overexposed for example), but it is the thought that counts :-)

Enjoy!

Buggy first try at PPC assembly....

While doing the ReWarp project and testing out all kinds of demos (the hardest things to get going IMHO, they break system conformity quiet often), I decided to test some of the demos also with the sonnet.library. A hard crash with the first demo (bus error) and a DSI error with the other was the result

After debugging I found some serious bugs in the oldest code of the sonnet.library. The very first functions implemented were GetInfo, Alloc/FreeVecPPC and the TagItem functions (NextTagItemPPC etc.). I hadn't looked at this part of the code in almost 1.5 years. It were my first real tries at PPC assembly.

Anyway, that fixed the bus error problem.

The DSI resulted from the demos allocating memory for the PPC using Run68K and not the native PPC memory allocating functions. After a fix to that I had some fun watching demos:

MadWizards - Till I Feel You:

MadWizards - Third Eye Conqueror:

Some gfx bugs in some scenes, but overall it looked good! I hope to publish a video soon!

Trying some games with ReWarp

When deleting hyperionvideo.library (no movies...alas) and with using the latest ReWarp library you can actually play Shogo MAD and Freespace (sort of...). At least it seems to be a lot more stable than with the old powerpc.library. No crashes while playing. There's one at the start of Shogo which isn't in the old library. I have to track that one down.


Starting up Shogo through the shell as the start GUI crashes (with both ReWarp and old powerpc lib):

The loading screen if you are fast enough. With no movies it goes by quickly:

The in-game menu. Warp3D renderer also works, but the game becomes very dark and unplayable. Maybe there is a gamma option somewhere. Also some glitches in the 3D with hardware acceleration enabled:

Start of the game using the software renderer:

Second level:

Bit further in the second level. Sometimes, NPC models seem to be missing:

Let's look at FreeSpace. Here the launcher works (with the wizard.library from OS4Depot). Don't forget to activate the Warp3D patch when playing. This game is actually playable now:

Works with all sounds enabled:

The tech room with the various models:

Flying around in your ship.. I rather have a blue HUD :-)

As a bonus here's a screenshot of Heretic II demo which also works:

Laters!

Up and running again!

I finally got around to check what happened to the Sam440 computer and opened up the PSU to at least check the fuse. Seeing the light show I had it probably was not something a fuse could have handled. And indeed it looked very much beyond repair:

I cannibalized the PSU of my AmigaOneXE system and voila:

You can imagine I cheered when the computer came back on :-) And now back to work.

Thunder and lightning...

Just a quick note to say that after returning from my vacation I had some nice fireworks when I put the power cord back into the wall socket of one of my power extensions. I pulled all cords before going on vacation. Both the wall socket and the power extension box were putting up a nice show for a second with loads of sparkles. Then came the nice smell of burned plastic.

Multiple equipment was connected to the box; a laser printer, 2 monitors, 1 PC and 1 SAM 440. Everything still seems to work....except the SAM 440. I hope it is only the PSU which has fried; I'm still waiting for a replacement to check that out.

First time I saw sparks flying at both ends of a cord (wall socket and extension box), don't know what happened :-(