Picture of the Day: Voxelspace revisited

When I was in Neuss, the library was just about ready to show something moving on the screen without crashing. The picture below is from the Neuss event.

As you can see (with a bit of effort), Voxelspace was about 25 FPS at that time.

In December, direct access to graphics memory was added. And last week I finally found why RunPPC was as 10 times as slow as expected. This resulted in the following speed with Voxelspace.

Another little step taken.

Neuss Event

As the Amiga celebrates its 30 years of existence, there were events all around the world set up by Amiga enthusiasts. I couldn't make the Amsterdam event (where I really wanted to check out the UltimatePPC) but the Neuss event was far enough later in the year to show something working, or so I hoped.

It was my intention to show something like an MP3 playing or some fast gfx decoding, but It was not te be. Almost all the effort went into making the library as stable as possible. It would be embarrassing to have to reset the Amiga every other couple of minutes.... Also a lot of effort was put into getting the wosdb WarpOS debugger going. I'll come back to that later.

So in the early morning of the 10th of October I set up my stuff in the event hall.

I was wedges almost behind the stand of Alinea Computer (here on the right) and Pascal from Ares Computer) but that didn't put a damper on things :-) Anyway, the A3000UX had thankfully survived the trip and below you see the Voxelspace demo running:

I was happy that in the end the Amiga crashed only once during the 8 hours it was on. At some points I had to break off the demo and show some other stuff (Cybermand etc.) and then back to the voxel demo. It all worked flawlessly. I removed the cap from the Amiga not only to let the people see what was inside, but because I was also afraid to overheat the machine (See the Aging Electronics post). At home, I'm actually running it again with the Amiga closed at the moment.

As seen on the picture the FPS of the demo is just about faster than a 060 and 40% slower than a 200MHz 604e PPC at this resolution. This is because of the many context switches going on between the PPC and the 68K processor. I'm looking whether I can improve here. I have to say that at higher resolutions the G3 becomes faster compared to the 604e or 68K. That is maybe for another posting.

I want to thank all the people I spoke with that day, it was real fun to meet you all. And I want to thank Markus especially for talking me into coming, as I threw all kinds of arguments in his face NOT to come :-)