@Hammer

Quote:

AMMX extension does nothing for existing 68K software.

There are many 68K programs using the AMMX instruction set.
From RIVA video player, over DIABLO game, Command and Conquer game,
Neogeo Emulator, Sonic game, Jake and Peppy game, Apollo Blocs game,
Apollo Crown game, DrApollo game, Apollo Invaders, Apollo Menace, Apollo-X, and many more ...

The games would not possible without AMMX

Will there be Apollo Meglomania?

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@Hypex

When you link to Apollo forum, you must remember to replace & with & in the URL (you can believe I have fun posting this....)

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@Gunnar

Quote:

Gunnar wrote: @Hammer Quote: AMMX extension does nothing for existing 68K software. There are many 68K programs using the AMMX instruction set. From RIVA video player, over DIABLO game, Command and Conquer game, Neogeo Emulator, Sonic game, Jake and Peppy game, Apollo Blocs game, Apollo Crown game, DrApollo game, Apollo Invaders, Apollo Menace, Apollo-X, and many more ... The games would not possible without AMMX

Did you assume I didn't notice Coffin R58 and Coffin R60 and downloaded the two 32 GB MicroSD images?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJwdColUxUs
Coffin R58's Quake demo3 benchmark on the Amiga 500 with PiStorm with bare metal Emu68 and Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+. Notice the icon drawers are from Coffin R58 that I combined with my AmigaOS 3.2 installation. Quake demo3 benchmark scored about 64 fps with Emu68 CPU monitor running in the background.

From Coffin R58, there are two RIVA executable builds, one for 68K and one for AMMX. The startup sequence swaps executables depending on CPU detection.
RIVA 68K runs Coffin R58's MPEG videos just fine on PiStorm/Emu68.

Like RIVA, FroggerNG runs Coffin R58's MPEG videos just fine on PiStorm/Emu68.

Coffin R58's DevilutionX (Diablo) game runs fine on PiStorm/Emu68K.

I noticed NeoGeo ROMs. tsk, tsk. Don't worry, I'm not interested in them since I purchased Capcom Arcade Stadium packs and Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection from Steam.

For Coffin R58's Amiga ROMs, I have multiple licenses for AmigaOS 3.2/3.2.1 (each build for A500 and A1200) and Amiga Forever 2016.

I do poke around various AmigaOS/Coffin/AROS distributions.

PiStorm/Emu68 has the compute power run software render Wazp3D GLQuake brute force at nearly playable framerates.

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_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@Hammer

To me the essential spirit of AMIGA is the combination of a powerful and programmer friendly CPU with the elegant DMA based clever and smart chipset. To me Amiga is about elegance, with just few assemble instructions you can play a music file. And with the Amiga Copper can you awesome things in a very elegant way.

This Amiga spirit is our credo in our development.

Our CPU is very programmer friendly and very elegant to use.
The DMA based Super-AGA chipset support the CPU.
It offers improved color modes, higher resolutions, and improved Copper, DMA Ethernet, improved Amiga Audio and so on and so forth.
You only need assembler 5 instruction to play a complete CD quality music track in 16bit stereo.
This is elegant coding to me.

Of course you can also use a multigigaherz clocked PC to emulate an 68K
This is not new. UAE does this since long time. To me this is not exiting.
To me this does not has any of elegance of the Amiga spirit anymore.


To me the Amiga was by design elegant and efficient.
With only 7MHz it could do stuff which 50MHz PCs failed to do at the time.

AMMX is very coder friendly, its very easy to read.
And it increase highly the performance at current clockrate.
This means it is very highly efficient.

I dont if you understand this or agree.


And as you know we plan to go for ASIC in the future.
This means we have the potential to reach then 10x or 20x the speed of today.
We today play already games never seen on Amiga before.
Take a look at Apollo-X this is a shoot up game totally above anything ever seen on Amiga so far.

@Gunnar

Where is the open source SAGA that you announced more than 5 years ago?

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@Gunnar

Quote:

Gunnar wrote: @Hammer To me the essential spirit of AMIGA is the combination of a powerful and programmer friendly CPU with the elegant DMA based clever and smart chipset. To me Amiga is about elegance, with just few assemble instructions you can play a music file. And with the Amiga Copper can you awesome things in a very elegant way. This Amiga spirit is our credo in our development. Our CPU is very programmer friendly and very elegant to use. The DMA based Super-AGA chipset support the CPU. It offers improved color modes, higher resolutions, and improved Copper, DMA Ethernet, improved Amiga Audio and so on and so forth. You only need assembler 5 instruction to play a complete CD quality music track in 16bit stereo. This is elegant coding to me. Of course you can also use a multigigaherz clocked PC to emulate an 68K This is not new. UAE does this since long time. To me this is not exiting. To me this does not has any of elegance of the Amiga spirit anymore.

Reminder, Emu68 is bare-metal on ARM Cortex A53 CPU, hence it's not like WinUAE/E-UAE being hosted by another OS. Emu68 is located outside Amiga's memory address range.

From https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6120/2019fa/blog/transmeta/
PiStorm/PRI 3a/Emu68's approach is similar to Transmeta Code Morphing Software that targeted external x86 ISA for VLIW ISA CPU with 64 general-purpose registers and 32 floating-point registers.

Modern PC GPUs and SATA/NVMe are DMA based, hence the need for competent northbridge with helping the CPU's cache coherency maintenance.

Look at the mirror, the Amiga has PIO mode IDE.



From https://techreport.com/review/12458/amds-radeon-hd-2900-xt-graphics-processor/
Radeon HD 2900's command processor and driver offload i.e. hardware accelerator for software driver

Our tour of the R600 began, appropriately, with the GPU's command processor. Demers said previous Radeons have also had logic to process the command stream from the graphics driver, but on the R600, this is actually a processor; it has memory, can handle math, and downloads microcode every time it boots up. The reason this command processor is so robust is so it can offload work from the graphics driver. In keeping with a DirectX 10 theme, it's intended to reduce state management overhead. DirectX 9 tends to group work in lots of small batches, creating substantial overhead just to manage all of the objects in a scene. That work typically falls to the graphics driver, burdening the CPU. Demers described the R600 command processor as "somewhat self-aware," snooping to determine and manage state itself. The result? A claimed reduction in CPU overhead of up to 30% in DirectX 9 applications, with even less overhead in DX10.

NVIDIA used customized RISC-V for the GPU's command processor.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/09/23/nvidia-shuts-out-risc-v-software-support-for-gpus/

“We like RISC-V because it’s open source… but more importantly, it’s adaptable. We can use it for all kinds of interesting configurations of CPUs. However, RISC-V is not appropriate yet and not for some time for external third-party software,” Huang said.

By comparison, the x86 and Arm architectures have a large software ecosystem that isn’t fragmented and is stable, regardless of the supplier it comes from, Huang said.

The benefit of RISC-V being open source and adaptable could also have its disadvantages, Huang said.

The RISC-V architecture is more like a chip version of Linux, and is free to license and modify. The goal is for companies to make and manufacture their own chips at a low cost, while cutting reliance on proprietary x86 and ARM architectures, which have to be bought or licensed.

The RISC-V architecture has a base instruction set on which companies can customize by putting their proprietary extensions. For example, Nvidia competitor Imagination has made its own RISC-V CPU called Catapult, on which it can bundle its compatible GPU for graphics and AI. Imagination offers full software and debug support. Similarly, others offer RISC-V AI chips with vector extensions with their own software stacks.

There-in lies the problem. Huang views that incoherent software ecosystem, with different software offerings tuned to different chips, as the disadvantage for RISC-V. He indicated that contributing to a fragmented ecosystem won’t be healthy for the development of RISC-V.

“We’ll see how the world evolves in the long term. But building an ecosystem that is software compatible, that is architecturally compatible, it’s very, very hard to do,” Huang said, adding “can you make a RISC-V that is like an ecosystem, like Arm and x86? Of course, but it will probably take a decade or two.”

Huang’s view could be a reflection of how Apple views RISC-V. Apple is replacing Arm controllers with RISC-V cores on non-user facing parts, semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel said in a newsletter post earlier this month. Those parts typically rely less on system software.



Quote:

To me the Amiga was by design elegant and efficient. With only 7MHz it could do stuff which 50MHz PCs failed to do at the time.

With ET4000W32 (clone IBM 8514/a), 486DX2-50 PC can easily play Doom while 7 Mhz 68000 Amiga is unable to play Doom. https://youtu.be/ViWFH8tx6Eo?t=32
ET4000AX ISA was released in 1989.


PC's 1991 Wing Commander only needs a reasonable clone VGA chipset (faster than IBM VGA trash) and 386DX 20 to 25 Mhz.
Reference https://youtu.be/KxMt-bIm5bk?t=252
For a similar result, Amiga 1200 would need 32-bit Fast Ram and 68020/68030 @ 25 Mhz for Wing Commander AGA. Amiga 1200 with 8MB Fast Ram is not good enough for Wing Commander AGA.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o9yOBBWPgM
This video shows a 286 PC clocked at 16 MHz with VGA and Sound Blaster adapters, executing some 90's great games:
0:00 Alone in the Dark
10:00 Tubular Worlds
15:54 Body Blows
25:39 Test Drive III: The Passion
31:46 Gods
41:47 Golden Axe VGA (VGA 256 colors)
44:47 Pinball Fantasies (VGA 256 colors)
58:52 Prehistorik 2

Depending on the VGA chipset, a 286 @ 16 Mhz-based PC can rival Amiga 500/1200's gaming results.

My regret is my Dad has purchased an ex-corporate IBM PS/2 Model 55SX with MCA slots that couldn't use the $129 ET4000AX ISA. My Dad later sold IBM PS/2 Model 55SX for 386DX33 PC clone with ET4000AX. 386DX33 PC with ET4000AX served as my gaming PC during the A1200 AGA era from late 1992 to 1994.

IBM PS/2 Model 55SX trash clouded my view on PC until my Dad purchased a 386DX33 PC clone with ET4000AX. Early 1992, my Dad's ex-corporate A3000 purchase was a surprise that blocked the A1200 purchase and A3000's ECS was a disappointment. I didn't have control over computer purchasing decisions until the 1996 Pentium 150 era. Our 1990s family's yearly budget for computer purchases is about $1100 AUD (or about $800 USD ) per annum.

Quote:

AMMX is very coder friendly, its very easy to read. And it increase highly the performance at current clockrate. This means it is very highly efficient. I dont if you understand this or agree. And as you know we plan to go for ASIC in the future. This means we have the potential to reach then 10x or 20x the speed of today. We today play already games never seen on Amiga before. Take a look at Apollo-X this is a shoot up game totally above anything ever seen on Amiga so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS2OAsGwdM4
RESHOOT PROXIMA 3 at Gamescom 2021 for Amiga AGA

https://youtu.be/_fLdudinjHY?t=81
Recent RESHOOT PROXIMA 3 demo build test for A1200 with Fast RAM.

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_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

Very quickly, because I've to bring my kid to school and the start working.

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @cdimauro Quote: If you got the original version that you had troubles anyway, since it required Slow RAM(see above). Now sure. May have grabbed it off Aminet or likely on a coverdisk if it was featured. What I do recall is the drive. My Amiga club got a stack of Amiga A1200 Magic Packs. Left over from a local casino that used Amigas as the hardware for pokie machines. They took the Amiga board out and didn't use the rest. So they had packs with new case, floppy drive and all software. I must have had floppy trouble or just wanted a fresh drive so I swapped the new one in place. I immediately had more "AGA" troubles with some games and demos failing to load. The new Escom drive being the cause. Drive ready went missing. There's an AGA version here. But it doesn't say exactly what is fixed. It only mentions track loaders which looks to be related to my problem. http://aminet.net/package/demo/file/MST-SOTA

It's not the original one. From the readme:

Some words about the lame coding in this demo:

It would have been much simpler for me and Lonestarr (coder of the demo)
if he hadn't spreaded those TWO DOZENS trackloaders all over the disk.
I'm sure Lonestarr would have saved his time if he had used a certain
Main program which would have loaded everything.


But, more interesting, from the executable:

ANOTHER LAME DEMO ####ED UP BY SPACEBALLS!!!! BUT! SKID ROW THE LEADER IN THE SCENE MADE IT POSSIBLE NOW YOU CAN ENJOY IT ON ALL AMIGAS ( WITHOUT 680x0,sorry! )


which is clear, right?


@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: The page states only OCS/ECS: it says nothing about 1MB Chip RAM. Which isn't working, anyway: Whereas just adding 512kB of Slow RAM (like I did with the A4000) worked... From https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/theparty92/amiga/demo/spb-sota.dms "State of the Art by Spaceballs" worked my WinUAE's A500 with ECS Agnus 1MB chip ram

Same here: it's not the original one.

From uncompressed DMS:

SPACEBALLS STATE OF THE ART 1MB CHIPMEM VERSION BY XTAL / MORA NET ON TOUR CALL OUR BOARD TRANSFER CENTRAL +46-250-15694 16K8 DUAL


And this is clear as well.

@Gunnar
Quote:

There are many 68K programs using the AMMX instruction set. From RIVA video player, over DIABLO game, Command and Conquer game, Neogeo Emulator, Sonic game, Jake and Peppy game, Apollo Blocs game, Apollo Crown game, DrApollo game, Apollo Invaders, Apollo Menace, Apollo-X, and many more ...

That's not "many", that's "very few".
And I truely wonder how all those straight PC-ports fit into your definition of Amiga elegance.

Quote:

The games would not possible without AMMX

Simplistic Bean Machine or Space Invader clones aren't possible without AMMX?

Quote:

Of course you can also use a multigigaherz clocked PC to emulate an 68K This is not new. UAE does this since long time. To me this is not exiting. To me this does not has any of elegance of the Amiga spirit anymore. ...

This doesn't make much sense because the only "unelegant" thing by your definition here is the host system.
The programs running inside the emulator are just as "elegantly" coded and use the Amiga system in just the same "elegant" way as on a more real thing.

So far the Apollo games list consists out of straight open-source PC ports (recompiles with little adjustments), some ultra-simple games which look as if they came directly from some JS tutorial webpage, and some upcoming classic shmups which still have to prove if they provide more than just some more colors and moving-objects than you'd expect on a real Amiga.

Quote:

Take a look at Apollo-X this is a shoot up game totally above anything ever seen on Amiga so far.

You could as well say "take a look at *insert name of your favorite eye-candy PC-game on Steam here*, it's totally above anything ever seen on AMIGA".
Congrats, but pointless. So your 2020s computer product allows you to graphically outperform thirty years old hardware.

Quote:

With only 7MHz it could do stuff which 50MHz PCs failed to do at the time.

We all agree that the real classic Amiga was great. But what's your point in? A Vampire with AMMX is not such an Amiga. And in contrast to the real Amiga back then it cannot compete with todays PCs.

In all fairness, it's hard to get any of the points you try to make.

@FairBoy

Quote:

Simplistic Bean Machine or Space Invader clones aren't possible without AMMX?

Apollo Invaders is more than a simple Space Invader clone, its a remake with High resolutions and truecolor and many nice effects.
The game features hundred of Anti-aliased Sprites and Laser beams with glowing halo and translucent trails as well as explosions, Fireball and Energy-Shields using Alphablend-effects.

Using high resolution, truecolor and Alpha effects on hundreds of Sprites for a fast 60 FPS shoot em up - is something complete new for Amiga.

Of course old Amiga shoot em up games used lowres and a limited number of colors.
While using RTG, Amiga games could in theory have done alpha blending or anti-aliasing - but this was not done. Simply because to compute Alpha blending or anti-aliasing a very high number of instruction / high number of multiplications was needed - and even 68060 was never fast enough for this.

The AMMX provides very easy to use instructions for this.
These AMMX instructions not only highly increase the computing power several times they also save memory bandwidth compared to old school coding techniques.

In other words these AMMX instructions are very efficient and make it very easy to do things which were previously impossible.

@Gunnar

Regarding true colour, sprites and alpha blending, wouldn't the "Amiga way (tm)" have been to do this using new features of the display hardware? I was using Warp3D as a pure 2D renderer for this sort of thing way back. For example, simple screen-space textured quads rendered as indexed lists for sprites, shaded untextured triangle strips for copper style gradients and such.

AMMX sounds great as an extension for lots of otherwise laborious data transformation but if you're using it to draw on screen isn't that something of a retrograde step for the system?

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@FairBoy

Quote:

FairBoy wrote: @Gunnar This doesn't make much sense because the only "unelegant" thing by your definition here is the host system. The programs running inside the emulator are just as "elegantly" coded and use the Amiga system in just the same "elegant" way as on a more real thing.

Emulator's have their place, but elegant they are not.

Quote:

So far the Apollo games list consists out of straight open-source PC ports (recompiles with little adjustments), some ultra-simple games which look as if they came directly from some JS tutorial webpage, and some upcoming classic shmups which still have to prove if they provide more than just some more colors and moving-objects than you'd expect on a real Amiga.

A similar criticism could be made about the Amiga as a whole today. Creating a good game from scratch takes a lot of time and effort, for very little reward. Insisting that the Vampire is not a valid target doesn't help. First they tell us not to develop for the Vampire because it isn't a 'real' Amiga and/or few people have one, then they accuse it of having no games!

But why should it matter? It's not like anybody is going to get rich by producing Amiga games that sell by the million. We didn't get a Vampire just to play games. Some of us enjoy working in 68k assembly language and like to explore the possibilities of a faster system with new capabilities, just like we did when we first got our Amigas. That is Gunnar's vision, to continue in that tradition.

'Back in the day' porting open-source programs and creating ultra-simple games for personal use was a popular pastime. Just doing it was usually reward enough - and (as those of us who went further found out) often more rewarding than the grind of producing a commercial game. You can call it getting into the retro spirit or simply continuing to do what we always did, but so long as we are having fun what is there to criticize?

Quote:

You could as well say "take a look at *insert name of your favorite eye-candy PC-game on Steam here*, it's totally above anything ever seen on AMIGA". Congrats, but pointless. So your 2020s computer product allows you to graphically outperform thirty years old hardware.

Life is pointless. Others have already done what you are doing better, so why bother?

In the 90's a significant number of Amiga users had 060 accelerators and RTG cards, but very few games were released for this hardware configuration. So were the manufacturers of that hardware derided for producing 'pointless' products? Of course not. We all accepted the reality of the situation, but some of us dreamed of new games being developed for 'high-end' Amigas. If someone wants to realize that dream today, why not?

Quote:

Quote: With only 7MHz it could do stuff which 50MHz PCs failed to do at the time. We all agree that the real classic Amiga was great. But what's your point in? A Vampire with AMMX is not such an Amiga. And in contrast to the real Amiga back then it cannot compete with todays PCs.

An 020 with AGA was not such an Amiga, and it could not compete with Pentium PCs. So what was the point? And yet some of us still enjoy using those Amigas to this day, even though though they cannot 'compete' with modern PCs. A Vampire-equipped Amiga is simply a faster Amiga, just like an Amiga with 060 and RTG is a faster Amiga. That is all that matters. Comparisons to modern PCs are irrelevant.

I have a bicycle that I enjoy riding. I used to have a 3 speed bike with 20" wheels, but I wanted better performance so I bought a 15 speed mountain bike. By your logic this was pointless because it cannot compete with modern cars. My A1200 cannot compete with modern PC's, but that doesn't mean it's pointless - because I still enjoy using it. I also enjoy using my A600 with V2 Vampire for times when I need the extra power. I never got into PC games 'back in the day', so 'straight' PC ports are new to me. The Vampire gives me the ability to play those games on my Amiga (which we could only dream of doing 'back in the day').

@bhabbott

Quote:

Emulators have their place, but elegant they are not.

I think that's unfair. Emulators allow new software to be written for the emulated systems without the specific challenges associated with running those systems. You get to use modern tooling, rapid retest cycles, detailed in-situ debugging and a whole host of other benefits. It may not seem like an elegant solution to an end user, but it can be an extremely elegant solution for a developer.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @cdimauro I seem to constantly put things in a way you misunderstand yet the conversation remains polite. Quote: This method requires jump tables for each Kickstart version. And if you've new Kickstart versions then you need to update the slave. The jump tables are already there. Exec base, Intuition base, etc. Just need to redirect a direct ROM routine call into using an API call. They would need to be patched to call into a soft kick in any case. I don't know how many calls on average would be made or if they go beyond exec routines. Being most eventually took over the system so I can't imagine there being many.

The problem is that games didn't just jumped to the beginning of routines which are on the jump tables. AFAIR they also directly jumped to parts of the Kickstart and this cannot be solved by keeping track of / storing the specific & needed jump tables.
Quote:

Quote: Nice experience. This made me recall of another project which I've realized with an Amiga: a Jukebox. You know how it works: you put some coins, select the song (or video), and start playing it. The thought of an Amiga jukebox will have Amiga people salivating.

Unfortunately it can't be used as a regular application on any Amiga: it needs proper wiring to the CD players and LaserVideo players (I've checked, and it wasn't just one: three were controlled by the application).
Quote:

Quote: Same for me: I missed the 121 colours of my Plus 4. However if I've switched to the C128 only for the immense C64's software library; otherwise I've kept the +4 (I really liked the machine. And the look, especially: wonderful!). The cursor diamond looks useful. I've got two Plus/4s now. The first never worked as the board had been stripped I found and IIRC lacked PSU as well. The second never worked because of a dead Ted or CPU. I shorted out my original C16 when examining the expansion port. Dad bought me an A500 a following Christmas. Since then I've acquired two more C16s. One I bought from work experience in a computer shop with the wages I earned, or wasted, for 50 bucks. Years later I was playing Goldrush at the Amiga club, when I walked away for a moment, then stepped back to find the CPU had fired while I turned away. I searched for parts online, found a Ted and CPU I couldn't get going, but a friend found another C16 for me. In working order, that I upgraded with a -working- 64KB expansion, and SD2IEC. I tried a 64KB cartridge expansion but it was flaky.

Do you have space for all this stuff? Lucky you!
Quote:

Oh. Here's another song. I wanna be a cowboy, Could this be an ode to the C16 and Plus/4? (And C116 for that matter.) I think of the last line. "My name is Ted, and one day I'll be dead, yoyo." Well, that day came soon after. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wWySln4sY0

LOL :D It's perfect!
Quote:

Quote: Last fresh example: http://apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=4&e=39085&z=YFyVwU I know the forum there. Was that meant to go to a direct thread? It brings up Apollo sub forum.

Let's give another try:
http://apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=4 note=39085
but replace the space with an ampersand when you join the two parts.
Quote:

Here Gunnar also claims that AMMX is much faster than ALTIVEC. Well, the average AltiVec on a G4, could be running on a base CPU clock of 500Mhz on an old Mac laptop with 1.5 Ghz common on newer models. The AmigaOne XE G4 was 800Mhz. X1000 with G5 class-like CPU is 1.8Ghz. The base clock of 68080 would be lower but actual real speed or time is what matters. So if AMMX is much faster than ALTIVEC it really needs to be much faster than ALTIVEC to even be faster than AltiVec!

AMMX could be more efficient for some operations, but it definitely cannot be faster than Altivec. In fact, Altivec is implemented on hundred or thousand of Mhz processors, which usually are also out-of-order: they literally obliterate the 68080.
Quote:

http://apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=4¬e=38817

This time it's me that I've problem: I can't open it.
Quote:

Quote: Despite the claims, it cannot match even a low-end AmigaOne or SAM. Since a Sam lacks AltVec, AMMX would be much, much faster in vector ops.

Maybe only on some synthetic benchmarks which are just using vector operations.

On real-world applications there's no chance that it could do better.
Quote:

Quote: The only contender in this case is the PiStorm with Emu68. In comparison it almost seems like a brute force method. By emulating a 68K CPU inside another CPU. Plugged into an Amiga. So poor is the 68K state of affairs that people are emulating it in inside an embedded SoC configured to plug into the CPU slot of a 68K. But I actually expected this to happen one day. Thought someone might have tried with embedded x86 first. That would have stirred up the once Intel Outside Amiga community.

Which will never happens DRAM, for example, was invented by Intel: try to use a processor without DRAM(s).
Quote:

OTOH the Apollo core is using the Intel inspired AMMX in covert operations to convert the 68K into Intel Inside. They've infiltrated the base. Once Intel is Inside the Amiga the door will be locked and 68K kicked out.

AMMX is only a marketing name, since they are very different. The only things in common are the use of FP registers for keeping vector data and that the SIMD extension is only limited to integer data types.
Quote:

Quote: AFAIR my player (using my special mod format, which was quick to decode and taking less space in memory) consumed around one raster line. Without polling. Without interrupts (everything was disabled and some strategic vectors filled with bad values, in order to generate an unrecoverable double-fault if some sly tried to use the Action Replay to dig into the code). And without using the CIAs. Unheard of.

Of course: it was never released.
Quote:

PT takes some work to extract notes from nibbles. MED is more direct and looks better with a less rigid design. But the MED player does weird stuff and pokes bad values into registers and then 3 frames later the sound properly starts playing.

Hum. 3 frames is too much. Depending on the game speed, the sound can change after one (50FPS) or two (25FPS) frames with my player.
Quote:

Quote: I saw it. However if you have a tracker then soft mixing is possible also on a plain A500. But on a game... not the case (except if there isn't that much graphic to move, like I've stated before). My idea was less for games and more for general music making and playing. But an A500 would be too low a target I think on average. It has three levels, going from slow but memory optimised to fast but memory intensive. Modules could be stored in fast ram. But I never experimented with creating a test module format to see how practical it would be. Merging samples is the most I did which is one of the primitives in the idea.

Still, not practical on low-end machines.
Quote:

Quote: Ah, OK. Then it was possible, but using an extra, additional register. So, 8 sprites = 8 additional 16-bit registers. There was space on the original chipset, but not that much. Or just dump it all to chip ram like the rest of the sprite data.

Then the chipset would have required an additional read-cycle from memory, which wasn't possible, since the raster slots for the sprites were already quite limited.

@Karlos

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Karlos wrote: @Gunnar Regarding true colour, sprites and alpha blending, wouldn't the "Amiga way (tm)" have been to do this using new features of the display hardware? I was using Warp3D as a pure 2D renderer for this sort of thing way back. For example, simple screen-space textured quads rendered as indexed lists for sprites, shaded untextured triangle strips for copper style gradients and such. AMMX sounds great as an extension for lots of otherwise laborious data transformation but if you're using it to draw on screen isn't that something of a retrograde step for the system?

Exactly. There's no additional coprocessor that could be used to offload some work from the CPU.

So, it's doesn't match the Amiga "elegance" / "philosophy".

Actually PCs are more close to it, since there are several coprocessors and hardware accelerators.
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Karlos wrote: @bhabbott Quote: Emulators have their place, but elegant they are not. I think that's unfair. Emulators allow new software to be written for the emulated systems without the specific challenges associated with running those systems. You get to use modern tooling, rapid retest cycles, detailed in-situ debugging and a whole host of other benefits. It may not seem like an elegant solution to an end user, but it can be an extremely elegant solution for a developer.

Indeed. And you could also setup a CI/CD platform to automatically check changes on the software that you're developing.

This WITHOUT having to reboot your machine each time that something makes the system crashes.

BTW, emulators could also do much more. Like profiling the code and refining the generated code according to the collected statistics. They could also completely replace blocks of code with ad-hoc and optimized code.

@Karlos

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To be honest it stated off as a project to understand the problem domain better. I have another repo that has a less efficient version that I explored the whole concept of creating a software synth from scratch. It's called GIMPS (Grossly Impractical PHP Modular Synthesiser). This could make sounds but not play a sequence. I took the learnings from that and built a slightly leaner and more musically focused version to allow me to add realtime music to the PDE project. The source code for them both is on GitHub.

In future I may look more into the FFT domain. It's not something trivial for the casual passer by but I can see I will need to understand it better. I'm interested in detecting transients filtered through a range of bands. Which means I need to understand FFT to do that. If I go down the route.

Also, GIMPS, not to be confused with GIMP. Grossly Involved Photoshop Scopier. Or something like that.


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PDE music engine:

Looks like PHPoop. I mean, I've only seen procedural PHP, running on a router. I've not seen PHP OOP.

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GIMPS:

There's quite some size to this project with all files involved.

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I do plan to port the units created for PDE to C to be used as virtual sound chips for the MC64K project at some point.

Not C++?

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I should also add that I approached from the pure synthesis side rather than sampling but the music sequencer is very much like a tracker.

Well, chip tunes on the Amiga need to use samples, but they could be considered more pure since they tend to use simpler samples based on more simple waveforms or waveform primitives. Then there is MED, with the synth sounds, that attempts to use waveform primitives for building sounds.

Last edited by Hypex on 03-Oct-2022 at 04:15 PM.

@Hammer

That Quake demo3 time demo is crazy fast! It's mad!

So the GeForce 7800 GTX is from 2005 and PS3 from 2006 I read. I supposed that's not too bad. It's close. But a dedicated console GPU should perform better to me.

Defended PowerPC. Ha. Well, Altivec/VMX is part of PowerPC. But, Cell is a different subset of Power. Likely the last time a Power CPU was in commercial use. And successful, for Sony, for a period. Like all things it had it's time. Cell BBE more practical than that Power SPE that is or isn't in the Tabor. Apple dumps Power arch one year, then Sony embraces Power arch the year after.

@kolla

Thanks. I'll try again...

@Hypex

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Looks like PHPoop. I mean, I've only seen procedural PHP, running on a router. I've not seen PHP OOP.

PHPoop. How'd I miss that?

PHP lets you write OO code or not, much like C++. Before v5, the OO features were rather basic. It became significantly better with 5, with the conversion to reference semantics for objects by default (the norm for other OO languages generally), support for interfaces, abstract classes, namespaces and later traits. 7.4 "introduces" proper covariance (in my view a this is a "fix" to something that should've worked in the first place). All "modern" PHP projects tend to be highly OO.

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There's quite some size to this project with all files involved.

That's mostly due to a class-per-file "best practises" approach, tbh.

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Quote: Quote: I do plan to port the units created for PDE to C to be used as virtual sound chips for the MC64K project at some point. Not C++?

Probably. I do sometimes fall foul of mixing the terms. The current design is OO so it will likely be a relatively simple port. It could also be ported to C with a little more effort.

Last edited by Karlos on 03-Oct-2022 at 10:22 PM.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@cdimauro

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It's not the original one. From the readme:

No. I found an earlier one. But was more interested in the AGA version to see what they had fixed.

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which is clear, right?

No! Only more clear.

All Amigas have a 680x0 so that doesn't make sense. A 68000 is a 680x0. What they obviously mean is 68010+ or 68020+ with CPU32, so they should just put that.