User avatar
ArtstateDigital
Wales, United Kingdom

Posted Sun May 26, 2019 2:03 am

Your passion for this setup is palpable! I had an A1200 of my own for only 2 weeks without a HDD, it had to be returned due to a FDD fault. This was at the time Commodore went bust, so I got my money back instead of a replacement. A year or so later my demoscene friend 'The Welder' loaned me a spare A1200 with an HDD. A very fine setup. I used it mainly for coding and demoscene related activities and connecting to the UK BBS scene (Digital Candy comes to mind).

Prior to this, I'd use my A500 without a HDD and just accepted it for what it was. Like you say, it did get fiddly using Workbench from floppy, but it never struck me as a form of hardship, based on my requirements. These days I'm a huge fan of the Raspberry Pi running AMIBIAN. Configured right, paired with a 4:3 TFT display (resolution settings tweaked) it's 'feels' very much like an AMIGA to me. I even coded my comeback release (a music disk - OBSIDIAN BEATS) on it.

We really are spoilt for choice these days. Enjoy the ride folks! :)

User avatar
Mr.Toast
Roseville, CA

Posted Sun May 26, 2019 4:24 pm

I'd have to agree with you there. WHDLoad on an even modest A1200 with some expansion RAM is the only machine that I have on practically perma setup now. WHDload is genius and a great way to modernize your experience without a lot of hassle. A ClassicWB install is a great out-of-the-box experience and that is practically all I use. Once you have it up and running, it makes a great baseline to add and remove stuff in your desktop environment to your liking. One other great thing about this is being able to pop out the CF card, host it on your PC and run your WinUAE setup directly from that-or just make a backup. Freaking hell we got it good these days!

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun May 26, 2019 6:28 pm

Fascinating alternative opinion by internetsux (in response to Bulletdust's post) on Reddit:
The main issues with WHDLoad are that you rely on patches being made for the games you want, there are like only 3 people making patches actively (it’s mostly StingRay) who can’t keep up with bugs and shit because it’s overwhelming, and the patches do NOT run well on all hardware. Blitter Waits are a shit show making lots of games have slowdowns on anything below an 040. Look at all the EAB requests for patches to be redone because of slow downs. And if you have like an A500 with an ACA the games will tun worse than via floppies.

It is convenient and nice but the way it works means it excludes a lot of hardware to run it on optimally, even a lot of A1200s.

I love it, don’t get me wrong (I bought two licenses back in the day), but it’s not really perfect or ideal.

JOTD’s CD32Load seems to run much better but it’s still very experimental.

User avatar
Bulletdust

Posted Sun May 26, 2019 11:59 pm

intric8 wrote:Fascinating alternative opinion by internetsux (in response to Bulletdust's post) on Reddit:
The main issues with WHDLoad are that you rely on patches being made for the games you want, there are like only 3 people making patches actively (it’s mostly StingRay) who can’t keep up with bugs and shit because it’s overwhelming, and the patches do NOT run well on all hardware. Blitter Waits are a shit show making lots of games have slowdowns on anything below an 040. Look at all the EAB requests for patches to be redone because of slow downs. And if you have like an A500 with an ACA the games will tun worse than via floppies.

It is convenient and nice but the way it works means it excludes a lot of hardware to run it on optimally, even a lot of A1200s.

I love it, don’t get me wrong (I bought two licenses back in the day), but it’s not really perfect or ideal.

JOTD’s CD32Load seems to run much better but it’s still very experimental.
I have to say Intric8, I've never experienced an issue with blitter waits and I'm running an 030.

As stated, when it comes to 16bit OCS/ECS Amiga's and faster 030 and above processors, there is a problem with wait states when certain applications hit the chipset directly that is purely a result of interfacing a 32 bit processor with a 16 bit bus, the issue has nothing to do with WHDLoad at all - This is an issue myself and another friend both took up with Jens when the ACA500 was not long released and was confirmed by Jens himself. This issue is present on the original .ADF as well as the original floppy running outside WHDLoad and is no worse running inside WHDLoad - The second you insert the accelerator in a 32 bit Amiga and run the same software there is absolutely no issue as you aren't inserting wait states to interface a 32 bit bus to a 16 bit bus.

This is 100% the reason why I don't run accelerated 16 bit OCS/ECS Amiga's anymore - Quite often they actually run 'slower' once accelerated.

I get everything from WHDownload and I've never had an issue with fragmentation of slaves, everything runs perfectly and I've run WHDload on both an accelerated A500 as well as an accelerated A1200 using the exact same OS install.

Respectfully, I don't find WHDLoad feels experimental at all.

User avatar
Mallagan

Posted Mon May 27, 2019 3:10 am

Hi!
I’m new to this site (but certainly not to the Amiga)
I never got whdload to work for me, but honestly in recent years I haven’t had time to work on it. I will get it to work, BUT! There was one thing...

It recently came to my attention that the 040 may be too fast(?) someone showed a video of Shadow of the Beast running way too fast on the 040.
This is just a faulty setting, right? Or maybe an old version of WHDload?

I am sure someone can help me shed light on this for me :)

User avatar
Bulletdust

Posted Mon May 27, 2019 3:23 am

Considering the Amiga's custom chipset, you really can't have such a thing as too fast as everything has to sync with those custom chips. Certain aspects, like loading times, can be accelerated - But actual game play is pretty much limited by the speed of the custom chips unless you're software rendering.

Naturally this all depends on the application in question and how it's accessing the chipset, but as stated, it's why I no longer bother accelerating 16 bit Miggy's as the wait states actually result in a machine that tends to run considerably slower in certain situations. A good way to test for this issue was to run the 'Falling Up' demo, straight away you'd notice the text scrolling really slow. Slow audio was another issue, the Hardwired demo showed this really well where the text zooms - Audio would slow right down as wait states hampered performance syncing with the custom chipset.

This is why I love the Amiga 1200. It's a 32 bit Amiga with 2MB chipram that doesn't slow down even when using the more efficient ACA accelerators. I also love the Workbench resolution via my Indivision, that's something I could never achieve on my A500.

I'd love a big box Amiga like the A4000 just for the sake of owning one, but honestly, I just don't have the desk space. I actually came across someone willing to sell me an A3000T, but I just know it would get destroyed in shipping.

I was just comparing the AGA version of Zool with the OCS/ECS version of Zool, the AGA version is 'heaps' better, it even contains audio not present in the OCS/ECS version.

User avatar
EzdineG
Springfield, MO

Posted Mon May 27, 2019 6:31 am

Zool is a fine example of ”waitstates gone wrong.” If you compare the OCS WHDLoad version to the floppy based, you’ll find the slowdown is excessive and detrimental to the game.

Some are artificially hobbled, like Frontier (compare WHDLoad to the hard drive install). With an 030 you’re at 1/3 the frame rate.

Not that it doesn’t have its place. I use it all the time and find it incredibly convenient.

User avatar
twenty90seven

Posted Mon May 27, 2019 6:35 am

What model of Dell monitor is this one? Is it 15 khz (can you hook it up via vga to rgb to the Amiga?)

User avatar
Bulletdust

Posted Mon May 27, 2019 2:49 pm

EzdineG wrote:Zool is a fine example of ”waitstates gone wrong.” If you compare the OCS WHDLoad version to the floppy based, you’ll find the slowdown is excessive and detrimental to the game.

Some are artificially hobbled, like Frontier (compare WHDLoad to the hard drive install). With an 030 you’re at 1/3 the frame rate.

Not that it doesn’t have its place. I use it all the time and find it incredibly convenient.
Well OCS as well as AGA Zool appears to be running perfectly here, I know all about the apparent issues with Zool hence the reason I had it running. I'll make a video of Zool running today.

What are the specs of the Amiga you're using for WHDLoad?

If the OCS version of Zool runs any faster off floppy than what I'm seeing under WHDLoad than I'm really hopeless at the game!
Last edited by Bulletdust on Mon May 27, 2019 3:04 pm, edited 4 times in total.





Return to “Software”