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Questions and Answers for AROS AMIGA OS

ApollOS - Frontier: Elite II

Pedro Cotter
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 308
14 Nov 2020 13:49


Quick test of the HDD installation.
  No WhdLoad.
 
  EXTERNAL LINK


Smartroad 78

Posts 116
17 Nov 2020 13:05


I made a video a while ago comparing the speed of the stock A1200, a Blizzard PPC 68040 25MHz accelerator and the V1200 (firmware 2.12):
 
  EXTERNAL LINK 
  All the videos were synced to the music as that was the most consistent across all the processors, shows just how hard the stock A1200 was working to play it.
 
  Amazing to think I played that game on a stock A1200 back in the day!


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
17 Nov 2020 13:11


Wow A1200 is really to weak to play it :-(


Kamelito Loveless

Posts 259
17 Nov 2020 19:19


Does Frontier use the CPU instead of the blitter if it’s faster?


Smartroad 78

Posts 116
17 Nov 2020 21:18


Kamelito Loveless wrote:

Does Frontier use the CPU instead of the blitter if it’s faster?

Not sure, don't know how it could be checked?


Kamelito Loveless

Posts 259
17 Nov 2020 22:34


Easiest way I guess is to try it on an A500 with an Action Replay and a Vampire and froze the game and see if the blitter is used or not in the code. Even simpler using WinUAE running a fast Amiga.


Kamelito Loveless

Posts 259
18 Nov 2020 09:44


Kamelito Loveless wrote:

Easiest way I guess is to try it on an A500 with an Action Replay and a Vampire and froze the game and see if the blitter is used or not in the code. Even simpler using WinUAE running a fast Amiga.

In another hand seeing it being faster on faster machine indicate the use of the cpu.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
18 Nov 2020 11:58


Kamelito Loveless wrote:

In another hand seeing it being faster on faster machine indicate the use of the cpu.

Yes using CPU for rendering is actually not uncommon on Amiga.
Other games do this too. For example Stunt Car racer.


Boban Krsmanovic

Posts 11
18 Nov 2020 14:50


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

Wow A1200 is really to weak to play it :-(

Depends on the location of the game.
If you are closer to the ground, with city modela, and all, yeah, it can be pretty slow.
But no one force you to play there, and you can just play in open space, and travel from space station to space station.
That way, even on A500 it should be fast enough.


Smartroad 78

Posts 116
18 Nov 2020 15:02


Boban Krsmanovic wrote:

 
  Depends on the location of the game.
  If you are closer to the ground, with city modela, and all, yeah, it can be pretty slow.
  But no one force you to play there, and you can just play in open space, and travel from space station to space station.
  That way, even on A500 it should be fast enough.

Yeah, you can see the difference in the video depending on the amount of stuff on the screen. The game still slows down when it they flies near the cargo ship or through the ring station!


Mark Watson

Posts 5
03 Dec 2020 22:58


Frontier clears the screen using the blitter, but polygons are rendered using the CPU as far as I can see.
 
  Each frame is as follows:
 
  - Start clearing backbuffer using blitter
  - Game update
  - 3d renderer visibility projections, clipping
  - Wait blitter done
  - Raster polys / lines / circles / 2d stuff using CPU
  - Switch backbuffer & frontbuffer
  - Done
 


Kamelito Loveless

Posts 259
05 Dec 2020 13:27


Thanks for the info, so it might be faster if the screen is cleared using the CPU I guess.


Nick Fellows

Posts 176
05 Dec 2020 13:44


I seem to remember I made a special disk with Frontier Elite on it. I had the AGA version - I cant actually remember the trick now but - if you booted off the retail disk it didnt boot into full 32 Bit mode. I made a disk that changed this and did get some noticable performance gains.


A1200 Coder

Posts 72
05 Dec 2020 23:41


Kamelito Loveless wrote:

  Thanks for the info, so it might be faster if the screen is cleared using the CPU I guess.
 

 
  No. You need to have 3 buffers, when using blitter to clear previous frame.
  Buffer 1: showing current drawn frame on screen
  Buffer 2: drawing next frame
  Buffer 3: clearing previously drawn frame with blitter
 
  This allows CPU and blitter to work in parallell, and not wasting CPU to clear a frame.
 
  I don't know how Frontier does it, but this is how it should be done. The blitter should be able to clear a frame much faster than what it takes to render a frame for the CPU in Frontier with most m68k CPUs.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
06 Dec 2020 08:31


Kamelito Loveless wrote:

Thanks for the info, so it might be faster if the screen is cleared using the CPU I guess.

 
Which code is faster depends a lot on which Amiga we talk about.
The optimal routine might been different for an Amiga 1200 without fastmem or an Amiga with fastmem.

For faster 68k CPU (040+) the fastest rendering could have been to clear and render the frame in fastmem first and then copy it to chipmem.
 


Kamelito Loveless

Posts 259
06 Dec 2020 12:44


Sure I’m speaking about Vampire here.
  Did you see my latest post on the Roadmap 5/6 thread?
PS I see you did since you delete them, it was on topic since it was about compatibility...Well now you know, i hope that you’ll use the info I shared to improve your products compatibility.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
06 Dec 2020 13:20


Kamelito Loveless wrote:

Sure I’m speaking about Vampire here.
  Did you see my latest post on the Roadmap 5/6 thread?

You mean your off-topic post?

PLease try to stay on topic in threads.
A thread always has a certain TOPIC, and all answers to the thread should be in context of the original topic of the original thread.
Posting stuff that you might find interesting "randomly" in existing threads which have no relation to this is called "off-topic".
This "hurts" the readability and consensus of the original thread.
Please not do this.


Kamelito Loveless

Posts 259
06 Dec 2020 13:35


Off topic please delete.

posts 18