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!

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...

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!

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!

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!

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.

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!

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.

Picture of the Day: StormMESA hardware rendering

Getting StormMESA to work has eluded me for some time now. But from the depths of the Internet came the hint to use Warp3D/ForceVersion 3 as an environment variable. And lo and behold:

Most of the StormMESA demos now seem to be working :-)

More Fun With 3D

The past few weeks have been mostly involving bug fixing, optimizing and other boring stuff. The coming weeks will probably see more of that, as the library is far from bug free.

 But to fill the void here's a movie. The sound has been turned off. Also, my phone stopped recording during the last bit as its memory was full. So I guess that's for another movie.

Have fun :-)

3D In Motion!

I had some time off between cooking for the family x-mas dinner and had a look at Warp3D. I had looked at it before and back then it just crashed the system.

This time around I noticed that the ramlib_ppc task was the culprit. So I googled around and found that it was a common problem within WarpOS/Warp3D. The stack is just too small.

So I upped the stack size for ramlib_ppc and installed a 68k patch for ramlib itself and now the sonnet library hanged on a DSI when opening Warp3DPPC.library. Debugging showed that this was because Warp3DPPC.library was loaded into FAST memory. Memory the PPC on the sonnet card cannot reach.

So the InitSonnet program was adjusted to pre-load all the Warp3D libraries to the memory of the Sonnet and below is the result (e.g. 75 FPS on the Warp3D gears program).

On a side note: I had ordered multiple Sonnet cards from the US for $25 USD dollar a piece on http://resale.headgap.com/. Too bad they now removed it from their web shop without replying to me. I guess they didn't had it in stock anyway...

Happy New Year :-)

Picture(s) of the Day: Sonnet goes 3D

The pictures aren't very good, but hey... :-)

Here's the Sonnet running gearsppc.exe from the warp3d demo folder.

Here's a screenshot with my camera from a timedemo of 640x480

And here's 800x600. These are exactly the same results as the highest FPS on http://www.amigaspeed.de.vu/ indicating maybe there is a limit? 1024x768 sadly crashed.

Here a very bad picture of the test version of WipeOut. Couldn't get full screen... Something about not having the right modes.

Happy Holidays!