Ok, I have to take my hat off to Hyperion for their good work. I just got done playing MegaBall3. No big deal you say? Here's the great part...I was not using UAE. I played directly from OS4.
I'm looking forward to other great discoveries.

@jtubbs

So what did you have to do to make it work?

I haven't tried any of my old games in ages, simply because of the hassle of setting up UAE on this A1/OS4 setup. Course, I could just set up WinUAE again on my PC for that, but that's no challenge.

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@jtubbs

I saw that feature mentioned and it raised my eyebrow Looks like a very neat unexpected feature.

Please explain the full scope of this feature. Does it allow usage of any OCS/ECS/AGA gfx modes on a GFX card? Or only certain gfx modes like HAM?

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@jtubbs

Runs well eh? That was a favourite game of mine back in the day. Thanks for letting us know it works

@DWolfman

Quote:

So what did you have to do to make it work?

I double clicked the icon! I didn't have to change a thing otherwise. From what I read about the new capabilities, it appears as long as the software doesn't attempt any direct address to hardware, things work well.
I just remembered one thing I had to do. Open up the GUI preferences, go to the Controls page, and click on the planar to retargetable graphics. That should do it for you.

@jtubbs

One of the first things I tried was DPaint 3, and it worked, kind of. The freehand tool and dotted tools work fine f.e. but most of the others have problems, probably because they use the blitter directly.

Vista (a HAM6 fractal landscape renderer) also works perfectly under OS4 now without E-UAE.

@salass00

Quote:

Vista (a HAM6 fractal landscape renderer) also works perfectly under OS4 now without E-UAE.

Excellent!

@salass00

I loved using Vistapro, unfortunately the program resides on the old amiga floppies, and I no longer have the ability to read those floppies. All my old Amigas have pretty well breathed their last.

@jtubbs

Eye of the Beholder II runs flawlessly!
With sound and every jingle!

@Lazi

Quote:

Eye of the Beholder II runs flawlessly!

Is that an joke? I hope not

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Ei gude wie!
I love my AMIGA Collection...
2x A500 (1x 1MB) OS1.3
1x A600 (40MB HDD) OS2.05 (broken joyport)
1x A1200 (68030/50, 32 MB Fast RAM) OS3.1
1x A4000D 040/40 (48 MB Fast), OS3.9, Fastlane Z3, CV64, Deneb, Indi AGA
1x CD³²
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@cHaOs667

Tried running my Eye of the Beholder 2 HD installation for E-UAE without E-UAE and it managed to show about 2-3 seconds of animation and sound from the intro before crashing (DSI in ahi.device). Maybe WHDLoad install will work better?

@salass00

DAMN! And i am 9-10 hours away off my A1 to try it!!

_________________
Ei gude wie!
I love my AMIGA Collection...
2x A500 (1x 1MB) OS1.3
1x A600 (40MB HDD) OS2.05 (broken joyport)
1x A1200 (68030/50, 32 MB Fast RAM) OS3.1
1x A4000D 040/40 (48 MB Fast), OS3.9, Fastlane Z3, CV64, Deneb, Indi AGA
1x CD³²
1x µAOn

@salass00

Quote:

probably because they use the blitter directly.

I reckon it wouldn't be hard to emulate the blitter, after all it's just a couple of memory addresses that get peeked and poked, no complicate state to keep hold of and no strict timings to adhere to.

Last edited by falemagn on 28-Dec-2006 at 09:49 AM.

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@falemagn

Quote:

I reckon it wouldn't be hard to emulate the blitter, after all it's just a couple of memory addresses that get peeked and poked, no complicate state to keep hold of and no strict timings to adhere to.

I think these emulation strategies all boil down to priorities, time and resources.

The new planar screenmode emulation was a very nice surprise - this improved support of older applications.

To implement the blitter in software would be 'fun'. It all depends on there being a developer out there motivated enough to make it happen. They could probably leverage the experience of the minimig (sp?) project putting the logic in a FPGA.

I don't know what other issues there are outstanding for backwards compatibility. Is the blitter issue the top roadblock out there now? What about direct access to the audio chips? Is that supported in OS4 'final' or is it still a third-party add-in?

@jtubbs

I am doing this for experimental reasons alone but can you tell me http://aminet.net/game/board/Wuzzi.zip if this works directly or not? I am just curious. Can you tell me what happens when you run this program? Thanks in advance.

Looking through the sources to NallePuh, it isn't too hard to trap the blitter control addresses. A simple blitter emulation along with patches for OwnBlit() (use a semaphore?) and WaitBlit() might help a lot of older programs work, now that we have planar emulation.

I might look into this later (too busy today).

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This all sounds pretty awesome, even if a tad nutty :)

Has anyone tried Dune 2? That's fairly system friendly IIRC.

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@falemagn

> I reckon it wouldn't be hard to emulate the blitter, after all it's just a
> couple of memory addresses that get peeked and poked, no complicate state
> to keep hold of and no strict timings to adhere to.

OS4 is mainly a PPC OS which tries to be compatible to previous versions of
the AmigaOS software, not an emulator of chips (which are out of production
since decades) which tries to be compatible to classic Amiga hardware.
AFAIK there exist working blitter emulators for OS4 (UAE), I dont see the
point in adding chip emulators to OS4 when trying to use the blitter directly
was known to be not upwards compatible since 1985 and every existing AmigaOS
version came with OS functions to use the blitter (or any other gfx hardware)
which were thought to be upwards compatible.

Eventually its possible to create a blitter emulator which runs in OS4 and
is not part of UAE, but its unlikely IMHO that the OS4 developers will try
to write one.

@xeron

> A simple blitter emulation along with patches for OwnBlit() (use a semaphore?) and WaitBlit() might help a lot of older programs work, now that we have planar emulation.
>
> I might look into this later (too busy today).

Dont forget to query OS4 first if there really exist no custom chips,
otherwise such a custom chip emulator could probably cause lots of trouble
when running on BPPC/CSPPC and the "to be emulated" chips are present and
already in use :)

@jtubbs

Quote:

I double clicked the icon! I didn't have to change a thing otherwise. From what I read about the new capabilities, it appears as long as the software doesn't attempt any direct address to hardware, things work well. I just remembered one thing I had to do. Open up the GUI preferences, go to the Controls page, and click on the planar to retargetable graphics. That should do it for you.

Cool! I'll have to give this a try.

I get a feeling that most of my old games are hardware hitting, so this likely will not work for them (Frontier Elite II, World Circuit, amongst a few others).

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This posting, in it's entirety, is the opinion and/or statement of the author and does not reflect the views and/or position of this site.