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Information about the Apollo CPU and FPU.

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Simo Koivukoski
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 601
10 Jul 2017 23:21


Vampire 500 V2 GOLD2 / FPU+RTG Demo test
   

 
SoftFPU: femu 0.3 (10-Jul-2017) by Jari 'jarp' Eskelinen
   
EXTERNAL LINK   
   


John William

Posts 563
11 Jul 2017 01:25


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!! We have a working FPU! WE HAVE A WORKING FPU!! -stands up and dances and sings- YAY!!!

See guys! All we had to do was be patient and there we go! Officially we have a vampire accelerator with a full functioning FPU! :D

The best part of this, you can disable FPU or enable it at your free well heh and you can take your FPU anywhere you want with you ;)

Thank you guys for everything!!! :D


Pedro Cotter
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 308
11 Jul 2017 06:33


eheheh!!!
I like your enthusiasm John! Very positive one!!!




John William

Posts 563
11 Jul 2017 07:02


Pedro Cotter wrote:

eheheh!!!
  I like your enthusiasm John! Very positive one!!!
 
 

hehe, thanks :)


Szyk Cech

Posts 191
11 Jul 2017 10:07


John William wrote:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!! We have a working FPU! WE HAVE A WORKING FPU!! -stands up and dances and sings- YAY!!!

Did you read small letters bellow sexy image - didn't you?!?

Btw:
Maybe I something miss, but it doesn't seems like killer-app. And this fuck-offs neither...


FRAXINOUS Eric
(Needs Verification)
Posts 48/ 1
11 Jul 2017 10:35


Is it possible to get beta version of SoftFPU?


Manuel Jesus

Posts 155
11 Jul 2017 16:11


I tried TVPaint 3.6, it now will start and allow the selection of a Vampire screenmode then crashes at registration...
 
  Lightwave 5.0 fp does the same, I can now at least start the apps whereas that wasn't even an option before. We are getting there.


Chain Q

Posts 19
11 Jul 2017 23:22


OK, now that's unexpected... I coded that demo (Singularity IJTB), about 12 years ago. It's very bad code, no doubt. :P It needs the FPU for the 3D object rotations, which were 1:1 "ported" from some ancient Turbo Pascal code. But its use of the FPU is very minimal, and it uses FPU mostly for the wrong reasons...

It's written in PowerD language, btw, with minimal assembly addons. Please use some proper demos to showcase the FPU instead. ;)


Martin Soerensen

Posts 232
12 Jul 2017 08:22


Chain Q wrote:

OK, now that's unexpected... I coded that demo (Singularity IJTB), about 12 years ago. It's very bad code, no doubt. :P It needs the FPU for the 3D object rotations, which were 1:1 "ported" from some ancient Turbo Pascal code. But its use of the FPU is very minimal, and it uses FPU mostly for the wrong reasons...

And that is why it is so nice to have a SoftFPU even though it is still unoptimized and very slow. Lots of software was compiled for FPU and uses it just a bit here and there, but generally does not rely on its performance.


Tango One

Posts 102
12 Jul 2017 09:15



 
Chain Q wrote:

    Lots of software was compiled for FPU.
 

 
  Thats news to me. When I used my amiga daily and I hade tons of amiga software. I dont remember one pice of software I could not run becouse of fpu.


Simo Koivukoski
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 601
12 Jul 2017 09:21


Chain Q wrote:

OK, now that's unexpected... I coded that demo (Singularity IJTB), about 12 years ago. It's very bad code, no doubt. :P It needs the FPU for the 3D object rotations, which were 1:1 "ported" from some ancient Turbo Pascal code. But its use of the FPU is very minimal, and it uses FPU mostly for the wrong reasons...
 
  It's written in PowerD language, btw, with minimal assembly addons. Please use some proper demos to showcase the FPU instead. ;)

Thank you for your comments! :) Actually I find it cool that it has RTG support.

Would you have any interest to write world first 68080 exclusive demo, powered by AMMX instruction set?


Gregthe Canuck

Posts 274
12 Jul 2017 09:41


One demo suggestion - feel free to shoot me down...
 
A "dot" demo that scales, rotates and zooms some sort of dotty image. Perhaps even with different coloured dots. Maybe even animated?
 
This could make heavy use of some of the new AMMX instructions coming in Gold3.
 


Chain Q

Posts 19
12 Jul 2017 10:58


Simo Koivukoski wrote:
Thank you for your comments! :) Actually I find it cool that it has RTG support.

Almost all my intros/demos have RTG support. RTG support is quite easy. But this also means they don't really use anything from the custom chipset, and that I'm a better system friendly coder than democoder. :) (Neither of them are really breaking news.)

Would you have any interest to write world first 68080 exclusive demo, powered by AMMX instruction set?

Thanks for the request, but no. I'm not really the right candidate for that, and I'm not interested to do such an "exclusive" demo anyway.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
12 Jul 2017 11:23


Chain Q wrote:

Almost all my intros/demos have RTG support.

What makes an RTG demo on the AMIGA different to a demo on a MAC or PC?
 


Przemyslaw Tkaczyk

Posts 155
12 Jul 2017 12:16


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

  What makes an RTG demo on the AMIGA different to a demo on a MAC or PC?
 

  Well, by today's standards, the difference is huge - the lack of 3D acceleration (except for PPC+Warp3D demos which no one does anymore) and real 24-bit modes (again, except for PPC+Warp3D - for it to run on both AGA and RTG they need to stay in 8bit). There are, of course, demos that use their own soft-engine for 3D and screen compositing, but the majority of them were made in the late '90s (and today they are made just for the sake of it and that "old school" feel). One of the latest example of a PC demo that uses software renderer as opposed to 3D/GPU based one is "Evenk" by Mad Wizards (2016):
  EXTERNAL LINK  EXTERNAL LINK 
 


Johannes Schäfer

Posts 47
12 Jul 2017 12:28


Przemyslaw Tkaczyk wrote:

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

    What makes an RTG demo on the AMIGA different to a demo on a MAC or PC?
 

  Well, by today's standards, the difference is huge - the lack of 3D acceleration (except for PPC+Warp3D demos which no one does anymore) and real 24-bit modes (again, except for PPC+Warp3D - for it to run on both AGA and RTG they need to stay in 8bit). There are, of course, demos that use their own soft-engine for 3D and screen compositing, but the majority of them were made in the late '90s (and today they are made just for the sake of it and that "old school" feel). One of the latest example of a PC demo that uses software renderer as opposed to 3D/GPU based one is "Evenk" by Mad Wizards (2016):
  EXTERNAL LINK    EXTERNAL LINK   
 

No asked for a 3D demo. RTG on Amiga never has been 3D or do I have missed something. There are also many 2D demos on PC even today.



Przemyslaw Tkaczyk

Posts 155
12 Jul 2017 12:36


Johannes Schäfer wrote:

RTG on Amiga never has been 3D or do I have missed something. There are also many 2D demos on PC even today.

2D demos on PC? Give me one modern example that will run WITHOUT a GPU (besides the one I gave). Drawing 2D does not mean "not using 3D acceleration / GPU". And yes, you missed a lot when it comes to 3D accelerated Amiga RTG demos:
EXTERNAL LINK  EXTERNAL LINK  EXTERNAL LINK  EXTERNAL LINK  EXTERNAL LINK 
to name a few...


Nixus Minimax

Posts 416
12 Jul 2017 12:36


Przemyslaw Tkaczyk wrote:

Gunnar von Boehn wrote:

    What makes an RTG demo on the AMIGA different to a demo on a MAC or PC?
 

  Well, by today's standards, the difference is huge - the lack of 3D acceleration (except for PPC+Warp3D demos which no one does anymore) and real 24-bit modes (again, except for PPC+Warp3D - for it to run on both AGA and RTG they need to stay in 8bit).

I think the answer Gunnar was hoping for was something along the lines "you do it in 68k ASM"...




Chain Q

Posts 19
12 Jul 2017 13:01


Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
What makes an RTG demo on the AMIGA different to a demo on a MAC or PC?

Technically, not many things. For *me* personally it's mostly about where the active scene is, and the accepted "limited" platform, which is an A1200 (any AGA machine really) with a full featured 68060.

In fact, I was a PC demoscener originally, I only got involved in Amiga, because early HW rendering demos and Windows as a platform did not interest me, and I searched for another platform where software rendered demos are still a thing. Therefore I found Amiga and its C2P '060 demos and scene around ~2000... So yeah. :)

My new upcoming "demoengine" I work on currently runs on anything from a 486DX PC to a 68060 Amiga (with or without RTG) or (soon) even an Atari Falcon with CT60, and also anything which has a semi decent port of SDL2 as fallback/development environment. In the "write once, compile anywhere" fashion. (I primarily crosscompile from Linux and macOS these days.) Of course, specific effects or parts of the code can be still optimized for a given platform/CPU, and the whole thing uses LUT8 screens because it's primarily targeted for the aforementioned platforms, but the framework itself is all inclusive in theory.

This kind of stuff which interests me, so I do this. I'm not arguing however, that anyone should agree with this, or follow the same route.


Chain Q

Posts 19
12 Jul 2017 13:06


Nixus Minimax wrote:
I think the answer Gunnar was hoping for was something along the lines "you do it in 68k ASM"...

Well, but in fact you don't write stuff in 68k asm. You can, some people still do, but the truth is, large chunks of Amiga democode is written in C or other higher level languages these days. Heck, there were even stock Amiga 500 demos written in C lately, and not even bad ones! (Like some of the later entries by Ghostown.)

Of course you might still need to optimize some critical functions (hotspots) in asm, or if you do a 4K intro or something, but otherwise it's just simply not necessary.

But this is neither new knowledge, neither Amiga specific really...

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