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Writing 3D Engine for 68080 In ASMpage  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 

Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
13 Feb 2020 18:35


Martin White wrote:

Not that I'm aware of. You need an ethernet module:
  https://wiki.apollo-accelerators.com/doku.php/vampire:vsa-v4:ethernet
 
  Happy to hear if there are any slicker ways of doing this because SMB is very unreliable on V4SA so i use FTP and it goes something like this:
 
  - Build on PC / Mac
  - Copy to network folder that is mapped to FTP server
  - On V4SA enable network
  - On V4 start FTP
  - Download build
  - Disable network
  - test
  - rinse and repeat
 
  It's pretty tedious even with a network module. Stopping and starting the network seems to be required as it's not desperately reliable. You may get away without i suppose. I don't really know how to make it any slicker since it would be like that whether it was the Vampire or any other device. I'm not sure that serial would make it any better - I suppose it might.
Actually, this doesn't sound that bad. Shouldn't all that be just a part of a script? I presume network start/stop is a commandline command, no?

But I would think that having a full outbound internet connection would be more problematic than just connecting to the PC.

Is that what you meant by Samba protocol?

Do you use special internet switch or hub?

My primary internet connection is via cell phone, I don't have a classic router at home. How would that complicate things?



Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
13 Feb 2020 18:39


Stefano Briccolani wrote:

I don't know if it's the best solution of all, but I use the gdrive/Dropbox handlers to exchange data from pc/smartphone to amiga
  EXTERNAL LINK 
Interesting, thanks.

I'm sure that works with regular Amiga, but does that work for you on V4?



Samuel Devulder

Posts 248
13 Feb 2020 18:39


Script? Yes, that's what I also use. And in place of the FTP command which requires prompting or UI I use WGET which accept command-line login info and is also capable of fetching from both ftp: // or http: // protocol which is quite handy.


Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
13 Feb 2020 18:50


I did some googling and it appears there are micro-sd extension cables for about $10.

Is there any reason why those wouldn't work with V4?

Having one from PC and second from V4 next to each other could significantly speed up the process, though it still wouldn't work 100x a day, it would be useable for about ten builds per day, so kinda ok.


Martin White

Posts 85
13 Feb 2020 19:40


I'm not really sure why the full outbound internet connection would be a problem. Basically my Vampire is on my internal network just like any of my other computers. Both Coffin OS and Aros have this all built in (though on Coffin it uses Roadshow which needs a license but I already own a license for it).

I actually like the Google Drive idea if it works. I'm going to have to try that.


Stefano Briccolani

Posts 586
13 Feb 2020 20:17


I use gdrive handlers since their inception (three or four years ago). For me it's a very comfortable way to exchange data.
A friend of mine who registered three days ago said me that the author (Norbert Kett) told him that he's going to release an update very soon.


Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
14 Feb 2020 10:41


This situation radically affects possibility of performance fine-tuning and pipeline optimization.

On Jag, using Skunkboard, I could fire 100+ builds under two hours, thus trying dozens of RISC  instruction scheduling combos. Change one instruction, hit F5, check benchmark number. 40 seconds later again. Then again. That's how I achieved such high instruction throughput of the Risc GPU.

That's obviously impossible to do manually with SD card as my brain won't retain contents of the registers and code during the physical acrobatics around the sd card. The left/right hemisphere thing...

I'm going to have to impose code freeze on the 3D engine in about 3 weeks. Then all code changes will be permitted only on gameplay/audio/input.

Is it reasonable to expect that around June the network will be debugged and fully working on V4? That's most likely the soonest I could revisit the 3d engine optimizations for my second game.


Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
14 Feb 2020 12:00


google drive worked on aros


John Hankinson

Posts 6
14 Feb 2020 12:48


I am using SMB on the V4 and it's working well for me. One caveat however is that I was not able to get a map to the PC to work, so I had to setup a double step.. I have an RPI4 which mapped perfectly from the PC and the V4. My source code is on the RPI4 which I can build from either the PC via shared drive or from the Amiga via share. Run from the Amiga, edit code using Visual studio on the PC.

Works great!


Stefano Briccolani

Posts 586
14 Feb 2020 18:50


@Vlad
The v4 network adapter is already working (and is pretty fast) on latest v4 cores. Ask Gunnar if you need it now.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
17 Feb 2020 11:07


Assemblers are very fast on AMIGA.
This means if your game is written in ASM, then you can compile it in a matter of seconds on AMIGA itself.
While remote compile can be done this would not be faster than local compile for ASM programs.

Regarding performance measurement of your code, I can recommend you to use the readout the MIPS and Clock counters from the 68080 CPU directly. You can very precisely measure performance of your code this way.



Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
20 Feb 2020 14:43


There is no native Higgs compiler for Amiga, obviously. Which is what majority of my code is written in.

I wrote Higgs in C#, as that's the most productive compiler coding given the amazing string functionality of .NET, not to mention the fantastic automatic exception handling and chaining of the .NET functions.

Is there a C# compiler for Amiga? I obviously don't expect the .NET run-time, just a compiled executable would be fine.

Obviously, porting Higgs to C++ is out of question as that would take at the minimum 4-6 weeks.


Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
20 Feb 2020 14:49


John Hankinson wrote:

I am using SMB on the V4 and it's working well for me. One caveat however is that I was not able to get a map to the PC to work, so I had to setup a double step.. I have an RPI4 which mapped perfectly from the PC and the V4. My source code is on the RPI4 which I can build from either the PC via shared drive or from the Amiga via share. Run from the Amiga, edit code using Visual studio on the PC.
 
  Works great!
Very interesting. It just might be the set up for me! I will check out how much do they cost.

How exactly did you map the drive from Aros?



Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
20 Feb 2020 14:53


Stefano Briccolani wrote:

@Vlad
  The v4 network adapter is already working (and is pretty fast) on latest v4 cores. Ask Gunnar if you need it now.

Cool. Time may work for our favor here as I have to fly to Europe in two weeks anyway.

We will revisit the options for the network in a month. Till that time it is going to have to be tested only against the emulator.


Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
20 Feb 2020 15:01


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  Regarding performance measurement of your code, I can recommend you to use the readout the MIPS and Clock counters from the 68080 CPU directly. You can very precisely measure performance of your code this way.

Looks like benchmarks on HW will have to wait a month.

I waited a week for the micro SD card extension cable. It finally arrived yesterday along with the SanDisk 16 GB card and a PC reader.

Unfortunately, the extension connector is so wide , I had to take out both DIGITAL-VIDEO and a power cable. Neither will fit afterwards.

Obviously, after what I read about broken pins in other thread, I won't abuse the connector dozens of times a day with the SD card directly.

Does anybody have a tested extension cable that will fit between DIGITAL-VIDEO and power cable?

Also, will my 16 GB SD card work? It was the smallest Amazon had...


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6197
20 Feb 2020 16:15


Vladimir Repcak wrote:

Also, will my 16 GB SD card work?

 
Yes, its works very good for me and for others.

I think for sharing data like you plan, doing this over ethernet will be more practical even. We are working on a new release with ETH support build in this might make this easier to use.


Niclas A
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 219
23 Feb 2020 11:32


Here is a 3d engine running on a Stock 7 Mhz Amiga 500 with 1 MB of memory.

EXTERNAL LINK


Daniel Sevo

Posts 299
23 Feb 2020 16:50


Niclas A wrote:

Here is a 3d engine running on a Stock 7 Mhz Amiga 500 with 1 MB of memory.
 
  EXTERNAL LINK 

KK/Altair is a genious and is utilizing some very clever tricks but its about faking it as much as possible. And we're talking about faking a "2.5D" engine. It doesn't qualify as a 3d engine.



Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
23 Feb 2020 17:12


Niclas A wrote:

Here is a 3d engine running on a Stock 7 Mhz Amiga 500 with 1 MB of memory.
 
  EXTERNAL LINK 

Thanks, it's interesting, but nowhere near as impressive as wolf on Atari 800 with 64 KB of RAM and useable CPU frequency of around 1.2 MHz(after Antic is done fetching framebuffer values and other stuff).

Don't forget that Atari is only 8-bit and has just single register where you can manipulate numbers (two other are just index registers for array direct index).

Amiga has sixteen registers and can use insane amount of addressing modes, even two such in a single instruction.

1 MB of RAM allows coder to create dozens of large tables that can be indexed using a single instruction. In fact, with the 8 address registers you could concurrently access 8 different tables within one code block.

And there's Blitter and other chips.

That being said, I am certainly looking forward to exploring what kind of visuals are doable on Vampire in the similar framerate ( ~10 fps) and same gameplay style.

  Right now I'm deep in rewriting the track engine, just rewrote laser shots during last two days and their tracking of elevation changes and embarking on enemies now...


Vladimir Repcak

Posts 359
23 Feb 2020 17:15


Vladimir Repcak wrote:

  Looks like benchmarks on HW will have to wait a month.
 
  I waited a week for the micro SD card extension cable. It finally arrived yesterday along with the SanDisk 16 GB card and a PC reader.
 
  Unfortunately, the extension connector is so wide , I had to take out both DIGITAL-VIDEO and a power cable. Neither will fit afterwards.
 
  Obviously, after what I read about broken pins in other thread, I won't abuse the connector dozens of times a day with the SD card directly.
 
 
  Does anybody have a tested extension cable that will fit between DIGITAL-VIDEO and power cable?

Bump.

Does anybody have a proven SD card extension cable that fits into V4?

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