 | Scene demos on OS4 |  |
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Posted on 2007-10-28 10:44:33 by Pete
After the announcement that OS4 for PPC equipped classic Amigas, a few people expressed concerns that software that takes over the machines and bangs the hardware might fail.
These are valid concerns, and a lot of software that does this will probably fail, but not explicitly because they take over the machine; the 68k JIT emulator is perfectly capable of carrying on working even when the system is disabled. The reason software will fail is that it might have badly written startup code (a lot of older hardware bashing software has questionable startup code), or if it reads or writes invalid memory (its not like the coders could use enforcer while the system is disabled to check for this).
But to show that not ALL your hardware bashing software will fail, I've tried out a few scene demos under OS4 on my CSPPC.
Note: I don't know how well audio worked, since the paula audio in my A4000 is broken.
Note 2: The productions which have odd bugs below i'm going to try with and without JIT and report my findings to Almos, so they may end up working in the future.
Electricity by Appendix
The whole intro was very fast and smooth.
Starstruck by The Black Lotus
The whole demo was very fast and smooth, except the landscape scene with the moving shadows which was a little sluggish, but otherwise the demo was faster than I remember it running on my A1200/060.
Any one of these suckers by Ephidrena
Ran fast and smooth. Came up on the Voodoo, so I expect only the audio was "hardware bashing".
Fake Electronik Lightshow by Ephidrena
Ran fast and smooth. Again came up on the Voodoo. It did have a bug in the first effect; the particles which are supposed to bounce off the vector went straight through.
Respirator Stories by Ephidrena
Ran fast and smooth. Again came up on the Voodoo.
Gin & Tronic by Ephidrena and Scarab
The voxel effect ran a LOT faster than on my A1200/060, however it was very bugged. It appeared way too far off in the distance, and was quite often right off the screen.
Relic by Nerve Axis
This ran really fast and smooth, but crashed at the space ship scene :-(
Silkcut by The Black Lotus
This ran, but was slower than 060, unfortunately.
Ocean Machine by The Black Lotus
This ran, but was slower than 060, unfortunately.
There were quite a few demos that just crashed, including Heartcore by IRIS, Kilofix by IRIS, Captured Dreams by TBL and When we ride on our enemies by Skarla.
So there we are. Some demos work really well, some not so well and some not at all. But by no means is disabling the OS and bashing the hardware a problem for OS4; it just depends on what the code does after that.
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Welcome to the website of Peter Gordon. I like programming, beer, films, Amiga computers, velcro, lemons, walls, things that go 'ping', and various other things. |
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