Notices

Stealing our jobs AND pirating our software huh.

You can move here. It's a very nice country.
With low average rainfall.

Getting back on topic, I just was tinkering with overclocking and found Wiz n Liz works 100% smooth with frame skip 0 if I overclock to 1Ghz. At 900Mhz the sound breaks up on the same settings, very interesting. Even more interesting is that it runs REALLY choppy if I leave it on Auto frame skip, which makes me think perhaps the automatic frame skip is too aggressive. I confirmed this with Pinball Dreams too which runs painfully choppy on auto but again perfectly on frame skip 0.

I also think the on-screen LEDs might actually have a small (but noticeable) performance hit as toggling them on caused the sound to glitch although I was unable to prove anything conclusive just watching "top" over ssh. It seemed to consume more CPU when I turned the LEDs on but then gradually went back to normal. But then I was just running constantly in one direction in the game, kinda impossible to play properly while looking at my PC monitor.

Gives me ideas though for the compatibility list, I plan to add frame skip, throttle and overclocking as options when submitting compatibility reports. For those of us on the dark side overclocking it could be interesting to see what setting games require to work smoothly, although obviously that will fluctuate depending on code changes too.

Its interesting though, its the first time I have ever seen a difference between 900Mhz and 1Ghz and a hugely relevant difference it is.

The current frameskip was designed for FAME core so may not work with UAE core. Thanks for the bugreport.

OSDs take time to draw, so it's normal that turning them off improves performance.

Sound emulation is very dependant on cycle-exact processor emulation, so it's sensitive to performance changes. Amiga sound "system" consists of two D/A converters which data you need to capture and feed to Alsa as a complete buffer to play.

I did not test it to see if manual frame skip settings helped before, but the poor frame rate with auto frame skip has always been there on the games I tested, in every release you have made so far (that I have used).

True enough, but I was just a little surprised that it was enough to upset the sound.....

I didn't know the specifics but I knew it must be problematic emulating the sound on Amiga because sound buffer issues has been the biggest problem I have had in WinUAE. For a long time it was a trade-off between glitchy sound or a larger buffer with delayed audio.

Would you consider adding OpenID support for the compatibility page?
I would make some reports but I don't want another account created and user/pass to remember.

P.S. Every maemo.org account is also OpenID provider.
http://maemo.org/openid/

I have always wanted to support OpenID but never seemed to get round to it. I will look into it and see how hard it will be. I hate classes and object oriented programming though, just seem to have a blind spot for it.

It's not hard really http://wiki.openid.net/Libraries and shouldn't require much work (if you're interested in consumer only, which you are ).

dont know whether I should put this on here or the compatibility but ever since the latest version microprose F1 GP doesnt even load whereas before it loaded right up to the driving part, now it wont even load up the title screen, any idea as to why?

I have a request to you all.
You will find two binaries attached to this post. One with UAE m68k emulation and second with Cyclone emulation.
Could you test your favorite apps/games using both binaries? Does it run, the performance, is it cycle accurate etc.

Just copy both files to your N900 to /home/user, uncompress (gzip -d uae4all-*.gz), add execute rights (chmod +x uae4all-*)
and run the binary.

Alex, could you check whether the -cyclone binary fixes your speed problems (with not overclocked N900) and your frameskip Auto issues?

I still haven't decided which core is better for N900.

Cyclone should be faster but it could be less compatible. You may notice that it is significantly smaller.